Mueller Investigation

Robert Mueller’s Six Cases for Collusion

A closer reading of the Mueller report reveals a series of episodes that are, if not criminal, deeply corrupt.
Robert Mueller
By Brendan Smialowski/Bloomberg/Getty Images.

Nowhere in the sprawling first volume of Robert Mueller’s report does the special counsel exonerate Donald Trump of “collusion.” And yet, there is an obvious tension between the contents of the report and the breezy, seemingly exculpatory introduction given by Attorney General William Barr on Thursday morning, some 90 minutes before the 448-page document was released online. While it’s true that Mueller’s investigation “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election-interference activities,” as we have known for weeks, the actual report is brimming with incidents and behavior that appear, at the very least, deeply corrupt.

The trouble, as former F.B.I. counter-intelligence agent Asha Rangappa explained to me last year, is that “collusion does not necessarily have to be criminal.” Mueller himself writes, “in evaluating whether evidence about collective action of multiple individuals constituted a crime, we applied the framework of conspiracy law, not the concept of ‘collusion.’” So while the special counsel may not have found that anyone associated with the Trump campaign conspired with the Russians to hack the 2016 election, that doesn’t mean he didn’t outline a case for collusion. In fact, a closer reading of the Mueller report reveals a series of significant interactions involving Trumpworld and the Russians. In total, these six episodes paint a damning portrait of borderline criminality.

Trump’s Hunt for Hillary Clinton’s Lost E-Mails

It’s no secret that Trump wanted to get his hands on Hillary Clinton’s e-mails during the 2016 election. (“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing,” Trump said at a news conference.) But the Mueller report goes into great detail about the Trump campaign’s behind-the-scenes efforts to obtain them—and Russia’s apparent responsiveness.

Within roughly five hours of Trump’s public request, Russian G.R.U. intelligence operatives targeted Clinton’s personal office for the first time, sending malicious links to 15 accounts hosted at the domain. But the Russians weren’t the only ones in pursuit of Clinton’s correspondence. According to Mueller, “Several individuals associated with the Campaign were contacted in 2016 about various efforts to obtain the missing Clinton e-mails and other stolen material in support of the Trump campaign”—to no avail. Notably, Rick Gates, who served as Trump’s deputy campaign chairman, “recalled candidate Trump being generally frustrated that the Clinton e-mails had not been found.” And Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national-security adviser, also recalled that Trump “repeatedly” requested members of his campaign find the deleted e-mails, and, subsequently, Flynn “contacted multiple people in an effort to obtain the e-mails.”

Barbara Ledeen, then a staffer for Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, and Peter Smith, a longtime G.O.P. operative, were among those Flynn contacted. Ledeen sought to enlist Smith in an effort to obtain the e-mails through “open-source analysis” and “liaison work with various foreign services.” Smith ultimately declined, but a few weeks after Trump’s July 2016 conference, he raised thousands of dollars and created a company to search for the e-mails, claiming he was working “in coordination” with the Trump campaign, specifically with Flynn, Steve Bannon, Sam Clovis, and Kellyanne Conway. Mueller found that Smith communicated at least with Flynn and Clovis about his initiative. However, the Mueller team did not “establish that Smith was in contact with Russian hackers or that Smith, Ledeen, or other individuals in touch with the Trump campaign ultimately obtained the deleted Clinton e-mails.”

George Papadopoulos and the Russians

George Papadopoulos never did manage to set up a meeting between Trump and Vladimir Putin, despite repeated efforts that brought him into contact with Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese professor based in London who Mueller described as having ties to Russia, and Olga Polonskaya, whom Papadopoulos incorrectly believed was possibly Putin’s niece. Instead, his interactions with Mifsud had the unintended effect of tipping off the F.B.I. According to the Mueller report, during an April 26, 2016 meeting with Mifsud, the London-based professor informed Papadopoulos that he “had met with high-level Russian government officials” during a trip to Moscow, and he learned that the Russians “obtained ‘dirt’ on candidate Hillary Clinton.”

Ten days later, a foreign government—identified in reports as Australia—told the F.B.I. that “Papadopoulos suggested that the Trump Campaign had received indications from the Russian government that it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton.” The Mueller team was unable to confirm whether Papadopoulos shared the information with other members of the Trump campaign, writing in the report that two of Papadopoulos’s primary contacts—Clovis and Stephen Miller—did not recall Papadopoulos sharing such information with them.

Paul Manafort and Konstantin Kilimnik

Since January, it has been public knowledge that Mueller accused Paul Manafort of breaching his plea deal, in part, because the former Trump campaign chairman lied to investigators about discussing a Ukrainian “peace plan” and sharing private polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik, a suspected Russian agent. During her ruling on the matter, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said Manafort’s behavior, especially pertaining to his interactions with Kilimnik, was “at the undisputed core of the Office of Special Counsel’s investigation” into allegations of collusion. But the details of Manafort’s deceit and the breadth of his interactions with Kilimnik remained largely obscured.

Mueller’s report makes it clear that Manafort didn’t just share polling data with Kilimnik once, but several times during the 2016 election. Gates told the special counsel that Manafort instructed him to provide updates and polling information to Kilimnik, who he understood would pass the information along to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska and others in Ukraine. Gates “periodically” shared information with Kilimnik, who he suspected was a Russian “spy,” including private Trump campaign polling data prepared by pollster Tony Fabrizio. Mueller’s office was unable to determine what Kilimnik did with the information. But during an August 2016 meeting, Manafort briefed Kilimnik on the Trump campaign’s strategy and internal polling data, and discussed 2016 battleground states, identified by Manafort as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota—the first three of which were critical to Trump’s victory.

Trump Tower Meeting

The details of the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting—arranged by Donald Trump Jr., and attended by Don Jr., Manafort, Jared Kushner, and Russia-backed attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya—are now infamous. Trump Jr. was lured to the meeting with the premise that the Russian government had “offered to provide the Trump Campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia” as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” And while there is no evidence that Veselnitskaya or anyone else in attendance provided damaging information on Clinton, the Mueller report reveals that the special counsel considered whether “conspiracy to violate the foreign contributions ban” could be established, since the president’s son was promised “official documents and information.” But ultimately, Mueller concluded that he “did not obtain admissible evidence likely to meet the government’s burden to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that these individuals acted ‘willfully,’ i.e., with general knowledge of the illegality of their conduct.”

The Trump Campaign and the Center for the National Interest

The Mueller report has much to say about the Center for the National Interest, a think tank that has boasted “unparalleled access to Russian officials and politicians,” and its president and C.E.O. Dimitri Simes. Mueller laid out a series of interactions between Simes and Kushner, Jeff Sessions, J.D. Gordon, and Miller. At one event hosted by C.N.I., at the Mayflower Hotel in April 2016, Trump, Kushner, and Sessions met Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Kushner specifically recalled Kislyak saying, “We like what your candidate is saying . . . it’s refreshing.” Kushner’s contacts with Simes—both in person and over the phone—continued throughout the campaign, and, at one point, Simes told Mueller he warned Kushner “that it was bad optics for the Campaign to develop hidden Russian contacts.”

Perhaps most remarkable was a meeting between Kushner and Simes on August 17, 2016, held at Kushner’s office in New York, in which the two were scheduled to “address foreign policy advice that C.N.I. was providing and how to respond to the Clinton Campaign’s Russia-related attacks on candidate Trump.” Ahead of the meeting, Simes sent Kushner a memo that laid out potential Russia-related talking points for Trump, and he mentioned “a well-documented story of highly questionable connections between Bill Clinton” and the Russian government, “parts of [which]” (according to Simes) had even been “discussed with the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. in the late 1990s and shared with the [Independent Counsel] at the end of the Clinton presidency.” Kushner forwarded the e-mail to Miller, Manafort, and Gates. Simes did provide Kushner with the Clinton-related information, but when the president’s son-in-law was interviewed by the special counsel, he said “he believed that there was little chance of something new being revealed about the Clintons given their long career as public figures, and that he never received from Simes information that could be ‘operationalized’ for the Trump Campaign.”

The Trump Campaign and the Truth

One major takeaway from the Mueller report is that Trump and those around him have a penchant for lies and misleading statements. Mueller’s report did not lay out a case for criminal conspiracy. But it did acknowledge that he may have been able to, had Trump campaign officials been up front. “Even when individuals testified or agreed to be interviewed, they sometimes provided information that was false or incomplete,” he wrote. After all, Manafort’s cooperation deal fell apart thanks to his obfuscations and misleading statements. Of Manafort, Mueller concedes he was unable to gain access to all of the longtime political operative’s communications. “While Manafort denied that he spoke to members of the Trump Campaign or the new administration about the peace plan and his meetings with Kilimnik,” he wrote, “his unreliability on this subject was among the reasons that the district judge found that he breached his cooperation agreement.”

Mueller also noted that he was hindered by campaign officials who “deleted relevant communications or communicated during the relevant period using applications that feature encryption or that do not provide for long-term retention of data or communications records.” For instance, Mueller came up empty-handed in determining the purpose of a clandestine meeting between Erik Prince and Kirill Dmitriev, the head of a Russian sovereign wealth fund, in Seychelles during the presidential transition, because both Prince and Steve Bannon were unable to produce records of their discussions around the meeting. Similarly, Mueller’s inability to determine whether Papadopoulos told other members of the Trump campaign about Mifsud’s scoop on the Russians having “dirt” on Clinton came down to Papadopoulos not being able to “clearly recall having told anyone.” Campaign officials who “interacted or corresponded with” Papadopoulos told Mueller, with “varying degrees of certainty, that he did not tell them.”

If everyone he spoke with had cooperated to the extent Barr claimed, Mueller may have been able to prove a conspiracy. Mueller himself suggested this when he wrote that he “cannot rule out the possibility that the unavailable information would shed additional light on (or cast in a new light) the events described in the report.”