", The amount of underlying documents supporting the report is expected to be substantial. 10:29 a.m.: 10 episodes of potential obstruction to be disclosed in Mueller report. The Mueller report was released Thursday. Flynn in fact tried to “find” those emails, contacting an elderly Republican donor who tried to obtain them on the “dark web.” He did not succeed. © 2020 Fortune Media IP Limited. Adam Edelman is a political reporter for NBC News.

Some occurred in public.

Trump and his legal team urged key figures in the probe (like Paul Manafort) not to “flip” and attacked those who did flip (like Michael Cohen). --Cohen submitted his statement. II, p. 96) Amid increasing — and increasingly fierce — attacks from Trump, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions decided that he should be prepared to resign his post at any time. The businessman, Giorgi Rtskhiladze, later told investigators the tapes were fake, but added that he had not communicated that to Cohen at the time. Cohen also decided not to visit. Mueller received the president’s responses in November 2018. The report says Cohen told investigators that he spoke directly to Trump about the issue after receiving those texts. Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows diagnosed with COVID-19, Election 2020 live updates: Biden’s lead narrow but widening in Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania as votes still being counted, Why ballot-counting in Nevada is dragging on, Trump vs. Biden: Inside Chicago’s lone ward that voted to keep the Republican president: ‘I don’t talk about it, you know?’, ‘No sign of slowing’: Illinois hospitalizations could soon break pandemic record, raising concerns about capacity. If you haven’t, help us keep our journalism free for everyone by making a financial contribution today, from as little as $3.

"During the 2016 presidential campaign, a similar claim may have reached candidate Trump," the Mueller report says. Mueller submitted his findings to the Justice Department on March 22, and Barr spent the next two days reviewing the document before releasing his initial letter to Congress. The report further lays out myriad instances of the president's conduct with Cohen including: --Cohen had numerous brief conversations with Trump about the Trump Tower Moscow project from Sept. 2015 onward, as well as conversations with Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. Since then, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have called for the full release of Mueller's report. Attorney General William Barr gestures as he appears before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee to make his Justice Department budget request, April 10, 2019, in Washington. Mueller’s report said no one ever gained access to the emails. Follow live results for the race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The main reason he did so was because the Justice Department has held that a sitting president can’t be indicted. Confused about who’s who in the Mueller report? Still, Mueller said that the Justice Department's opinion that a sitting president couldn't be indicted meant he also couldn't recommend Trump be criminally charged, even if he made the recommendation in secret. Here’s what comes next.

(Vol. Yahoo forma parte de Verizon Media. Nosotros y nuestros socios almacenaremos y/o accederemos a la información de tu dispositivo mediante el uso de cookies y tecnologías similares, a fin de mostrar anuncios y contenido personalizados, evaluar anuncios y contenido, obtener datos sobre la audiencia y desarrollar el producto. ABC News will offer a breakdown of what the report says about each of these areas. And that after Paul Manafort and Rick Gates were indicted, Manafort told Gates that it would be stupid to strike a plea deal, since Trump’s lawyer had made clear they’d “be taken care of.”. Since May 2017, the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election has been a constant presence in U.S. politics – a complex narrative that has included a rotating cast of characters and myriad plotlines. 4:17 p.m.: Trump leaves White House, does not take questions. The special counsel writes that he “determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment” on whether Trump committed criminal obstruction of justice. ", In the analysis section, the special counsel specifically addresses the phrase attributed to Hope Hicks, "it will never get out"—in reference to the emails setting up the June 9 meeting. Porter thought the matter should be handled by the White House communications office, but the President said he wanted McGahn to write a letter to the file "for our records" and wanted something beyond a press statement to demonstrate that the reporting was inaccurate. Attorney General William Barr leaves his home in McLean, Va., April 18, 2019. The president's personal counsel also told Cohen not to make reference to an attempt to set up a meeting between Trump and Putin during the 2015 United Nations general Assembly. The report notes, as ABC first reported, that Sessions when he was attorney general was investigated for perjury over his testimony to Congress about his contacts with the Russian ambassador. The Trumps were heading to Mar-a-Lago for the holiday weekend. The redaction process.

Among the people: Carter Page, an unpaid adviser to Trump's campaign, George Papadopoulos, one-time campaign foreign policy adviser, Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, JD Gordon, a campaign adviser, Paul Manafort, former Trump campaign chairman, Erik Prince, Trump ally and Blackwater founder, and Jeff Sessions, a forrmer senator and attorney general.

", On Thursday, President Trump said following the release of the Mueller report: "I’m having a good day, too! The ire directed at Barr comes after he held a press conference defending President Donald Trump's actions and to speak publicly and take questions from journalists before the report from the investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election was released.

Our work is well-sourced, research-driven, and in-depth. Free Subscription Click to e-mail this site to a friend. But Mueller concluded that the evidence he had, particularly regarding the parties’ intent to violate the law, wasn’t sufficient for a likely criminal conviction. But, throughout, Mueller avoids coming to a conclusion on whether any of these individual acts — or the combination of them — qualify as criminal obstruction of justice. newsletter. speaker. Cohen recounts telling trump that the project was "going nowhere" sometime during the summer of 2016.

Minutes after Attorney General William Barr's press conference ended, President Trump tweeted "No collusion. A good deal of material in the report is redacted — including, it seems, information about just what exactly happened regarding Roger Stone’s efforts to get information about hacked emails from WikiLeaks.

This is terrible. --To stay on message Cohen told a NYT reporter that the Trump Tower Moscow deal ended in January 2016. (Vol. 12:23 p.m.: Here's a look at what it took to produce Mueller's probe, 12:12 p.m.: Trump orders White House counsel Don McGahn to deny the president tried to fire the special counsel. His bills were being paid by the Trump Org. Trump tried to prevent the disclosure of emails revealing Donald Jr.’s meeting at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer. Robert Mueller's 448-page report takes the American public inside the room with Trump as he expressed fear that the special counsel would end his presidency and made several attempts to get the people around him to curtail the probe into his campaign and Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Some of the cases related to the special counsel's probe are ongoing and have since been turned over to prosecutors in U.S. Attorney's offices. @realDonaldTrump: The Greatest Political Hoax of all time! Though Thursday's anticipated release of a redacted version of Mueller's report may answer lawmakers' demands for more information, it will likely be met with calls for even more. "We also assessed that based on the significant body of evidence we had already obtained of the President’s actions and his public and private statements ... we had sufficient evidence to understand relevant events and to make certain assessments without the President’s testimony. In a joint statement, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Barr's handing of the report release has created a "crisis of confidence" and said having Mueller testify was the "only way to begin restoring public trust.". ", Mueller says "we considered whether to issue a subpoena for his testimony" given that Trump would not volunteer an interview. Cohen and Sater worked to determine a time for a potential visit from then candidate Trump to Russia. The businessman said the "tapes" referred to "compromising tapes of Trump rumored to be held by persons associated with the Russian real estate conglomerate Crocus Group, which had helped host the 2013 Miss Universe Pageant in Russia," the report quotes. Original Images and PDF's are included on every page for reference. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s 448-page report on Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election and the Trump campaign was made public Thursday morning. The Department of Justice building is pictured in Washington D.C., March 21, 2019. Original Images and PDF's are included on every page for reference.

You can help by supporting Vox's explanatory journalism with a financial contribution today. “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state,” Mueller writes.

Trump has always maintained the allegations are false. (Vol. After news broke that Trump ordered McGahn to fire the special counsel, Trump pressured McGahn to deny that he had been directed to do so, even suggesting to aides that he would fire him unless he complied. The timeline is based on publicly-released FBI documents, congressional records and testimony, court filings, and certain media reports confirmed to ABC News by sources with knowledge of the matter. Graphic shows prominent players in the special counsel investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Erik Prince provided funding to try and authenticate some emails that were obtained by Ledeen but the tech advisor hired said they weren’t real. The special counsel's office made no conclusion on the matter of possible obstruction of justice by President Donald Trump, Barr noted, but the attorney general himself determined that the evidence against Trump did not amount to a crime.

Read more of Klein's takeaways from the day here. Barr was generally right weeks ago when he released Mueller's key findings. Democratic presidential candidates were quick to vent their frustration on Thursday at the conduct of Attorney General William Barr, swiftly called on special counsel Robert Mueller to testify before Congress and demanded that the full unredacted report be released to the public. 4:07 p.m.: Mueller's reference to allegations of Russian "kompromat" on Trump. ", Mueller writes that "Other answers were "incomplete or imprecise. Trump directed McGahn to have Mueller himself fired (but McGahn didn’t carry this out). Mueller says that Trump "stated on more than 30 occasions that he "does not ‘recall’ or ‘remember’ or have an "independent recollection’" of information called for by the questions." But Mueller, who interviewed many of the participants in the meeting, said he didn't find that he could bring a case. But people around Trump either refused or quietly allowed the matters to drop. contacts — between Trump campaign officials and individuals having or claiming to have ties to the Russian government.". Mueller writes in the introductory note that they advised counsel that "a[n] interview with the President is vital to our investigation."