Atty. Gen. William P. Barr emphasizes"no collusion" as he prepares to release Robert S. Mueller III’s report.
“The incidents were often carried out through one-on-one meetings in which the President sought to use his official power outside of usual channels.” The report specifically noted that could apply to any effort Trump might make to pardon associates charged by Mueller’s office. “The offer of a pardon” would be “within Congress's power to regulate even if the pardon itself is not,” Mueller wrote.
But while the two-year investigation did not find evidence that Trump or his associates cooperated with Russian plots, it did make clear that campaign officials wanted to capitalize on them, especially Russia’s efforts to hack into and release Democratic Party emails. Trump was meeting that day with Jeff Sessions, the attorney general’s chief of staff and then-White House counsel Don McGahn. Sessions stepped out of the room to take a call from Deputy Atty. Gen. Rod Rosenstein and returned to inform Trump that his deputy had tapped Mueller to launch the Russia probe.“Oh, my God,” he said, according to notes taken by Sessions’ chief of staff. “This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency,” he said. “I’m fucked.
At one point Trump asked Adm. Michael Rogers, then the director of the National Security Agency, to make a statement publicly rejecting news reports linking Trump to the Russia investigation. Disturbed, Rogers and his deputy wrote a memo documenting the conversation and put it in a safe. However, the investigation did not establish that the contacts involved a conspiracy involving the election. In fact, according to Cohen, Trump seemed to view the campaign as a boost for his business, instead of his business as a boost for his campaign.The report also details an extensive timeline of Trump’s activities that sought to limit the investigation, beginning shortly after his election.
The president also met privately with Sessions in the Oval Office in October 2017 and suggested, according to notes taken by a senior advisor, that Sessions would be a “hero” if he withdrew his recusal from overseeing the investigation.
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