Things to Watch For in the Redacted Mueller Report
WASHINGTON — The redacted version of the Mueller report due to be released Thursday will offer the fullest (but still incomplete) view yet of how the special counsel’s office ran its investigation and what it uncovered. Attorney General William Barr’s March 24th letter purported to provide the “principal conclusions” of Mueller’s probe — namely, that there was no criminal conspiracy or coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign, and that Mueller chose not to make a determination about whether to prosecute President Trump for obstruction of justice, while underscoring that the investigation “does not exonerate” the president. Barr quickly concluded that, in his view, there wasn’t sufficient evidence to bring an obstruction charge. Trump tweeted that his attorney general’s letter amounted to “total EXONERATION.”
But Barr quoted fewer than 100 words of what is reportedly a nearly 400-page report. We know from court filings and reporting on Mueller’s investigation that there were myriad events, money trails and persons of interest that came under his team’s scrutiny. Those details didn’t make it into Barr’s letter, but they could appear in the redacted report and so tell us more about Trump World’s contacts (witting or otherwise) with Russia or its intermediaries, WikiLeaks’ role in the election, and what interest, if any, Mueller took in Trump’s family.
Here are seven things to watch for when reading the report.
What Trump told Mueller
The special counsel’s office never secured a face-to-face interview with Trump. Despite extensive negotiations, the most they got out of the president were written answers to a list of questions submitted by Mueller. What were those questions? How did Trump and his lawyers respond? Did any of Trump’s answers contradict evidence gathered by Mueller?
Paul Manafort and “the heart” of the investigation
In the final weeks of the probe, one of Mueller’s senior lawyers, Andrew Weissmann, appeared in court for a sealed hearing to discuss one avenue of investigation: an August 2016 meeting in New York between Manafort, the Republican super-consultant who briefly served as Trump’s campaign chairman, and a Russian business partner named Konstantin Kilimnik. At that meeting, Manafort supposedly exchanged internal campaign polling data with Kilimnik and the two men discussed a peace plan concerning Russia and Ukraine’s conflict over control of the Crimea. Weissmann told the judge that that meeting “goes, I think, very much to the heart of what the Special Counsel’s Office is investigating.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/7-things-to-watch-for-in-the-partial-mueller-report-823383/
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