Mueller Report

Several features of the conduct we investigated distinguish it from typical obstruction-of\xad-justice cases.

— Mueller Report

Second, unlike cases in which a subject engages in obstruction of justice to cover up a crime, the evidence we obtained did not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference. Although the obstruction statutes do not require proof of such a crime, the absence of that evidence affects the analysis of the President's intent and requires consideration of other possible motives for his conduct.

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Third, many of the President's acts directed at witnesses, including discouragement of cooperation with the government and suggestions of possible future pardons, took place in public view. That circumstance is unusual, but no principle of law excludes public acts from the reach of the obstruction laws. If the likely effect of public acts is to influence witnesses or alter their testimony, the harm to the justice system's integrity is the same.

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Although the series of events we investigated involved discrete acts, the overall pattern of the President's conduct towards the investigations can shed light on the nature of the President's acts and the inferences that can be drawn about his intent.

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In particular, the actions we investigated can be divided into two phases, reflecting a possible shift in the President's motives. The first phase covered the period from the President's first interactions with Comey through the President's firing of Corney. During that time, the President had been repeatedly told he was not personally under investigation.

— Mueller Report

Soon after the firing of Comey and the appointment of the Special Counsel, however, the President became aware that his own conduct was being investigated in an obstruction-of-justice inquiry. At that point, the President engaged in a second phase of conduct, involving public attacks on the investigation, non-public efforts to control it, and efforts in both public and private to encourage witnesses not to cooperate with the investigation.

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Judgments about the nature of the President's motives during each phase would be informed by the totality of the evidence.

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The President's counsel raised statutory and constitutional defenses to a possible obstruction-of-justice analysis of the conduct we investigated. We concluded that none of those legal defenses provided a basis for declining to investigate the facts.

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Constitutional defenses. ...Congress has authority to prohibit a President's corrupt use of his authority in order to protect the integrity of the administration of justice.

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. Substantial evidence indicates that in repeatedly urging McGahn to dispute that he was ordered to have the Special Counsel terminated, the President acted for the purpose of influencing McGahn's account in order to deflect or prevent further scrutiny of the President's conduct towards the investigation.

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That fall, two federal agencies jointly announced that the Russian government "directed recent compromises of e-mails... intended to interfere with the US election process." After the election... the United States imposed sanctions... By early 2017, several congressional committees were examining Russia's interference...

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[I]nvestigatory efforts... led to the May 2017 appointment of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller, III. The order... authorized him to investigate "the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election," including any links or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump Campaign.

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Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election principally through two operations. First... a social media campaign... favored... Trump and disparaged... Clinton. Second, ...computer-intrusion operations against... the Clinton Campaign and... then released stolen documents.

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A statement that the investigation did not establish particular facts does not mean there was no evidence of those facts.

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Volume II addresses the President's actions towards the FBI's investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election and related matters, and his actions towards the Special Counsel's investigation. Volume II separately states its framework and the considerations that guided that investigation.

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The (IRA) carried out the earliest Russian interference operations identified...—a social media campaign designed to provoke and amplify political and social discord in the United States. The IRA... received funding from Russian oligarch and companies he controlled. Prigozhin is widely reported to have ties to... Putin.

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In mid-2014, the IRA sent employees to the United States on an intelligence-gathering mission...

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The ...("Trump Campaign" or "Campaign") showed interest in WikiLeaks's releases of documents and welcomed their potential to damage candidate Clinton.

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WikiLeaks began releasing Podesta's stolen emails on October 7, 2016, less than one hour after a U.S. media outlet released video considered damaging to candidate Trump. Section III... details... Russian hacking operations, as well as other efforts by Trump Campaign supporters to obtain Clinton-related emails.

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The Russian contacts consisted of business connections, offers of assistance to the Campaign, invitations for candidate Trump and Putin to meet... invitations for Campaign officials and representatives of the Russian government to meet, and policy positions seeking improved U.S.-Russian relations.

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Section IV of this Report details the contacts between Russia and the Trump Campaign...

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Spring 2016. Campaign foreign policy advisor made early contact with , a London-based professor who had connections to Russia and traveled to Moscow in April 2016. Immediately upon his return to London from that trip, Mifsud told Papadopoulos that the Russian government had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton...

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Post-2016 Election. Immediately after the... election, Russian government officials and prominent Russian businessmen began trying to make inroads into the new administration. ...The Russian Embassy made contact hours after the election to congratulate the President-Elect and to arrange a call with President Putin. Several Russian businessmen picked up the effort from there.

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On January 6, 2017, members of the intelligence community briefed President-Elect Trump on a joint assessment-drafted and coordinated among the Central Intelligence Agency, FBI, and National Security Agency-that concluded with high confidence that Russia had intervened in the election through a variety of means to assist Trump's candidacy and harm Clinton's. A declassified version of the assessment was publicly released that same day.

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On May 17, 2017, Acting Attorney General appointed the Special Counsel and authorized him to conduct the investigation that Comey had confirmed... as well as matters arising directly from the investigation, and... efforts to interfere with or obstruct the investigation.

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Section V of the report provides detailed explanations of the Office's charging decisions, which contain three main components.

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Accordingly, while this report embodies factual and legal determinations that the Office believes to be accurate and complete to the greatest extent possible, given these identified gaps, the Office 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.

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There was substantial evidence immediately available to the Special Counsel at the inception of the investigation in May 2017 because the FBI had, by that time, already investigated Russian election interference for nearly 10 months.

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Certain proceedings associated with the Office's work remain ongoing. [T]he Office has transferred responsibility for... remaining issues to other components of the Department of Justice and FBI. Appendix D lists those transfers.

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[T]he Office issued more than 2,800 subpoenas under the auspices of a grand jury sitting in the District of Columbia; executed nearly 500 search-and-seizure warrants; obtained more than 230 orders for communications records... obtained almost 50 orders authorizing use of s; made 13 requests to foreign governments pursuant to Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties; and interviewed approximately 500 witnesses, including almost 80 before a grand jury.

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The first form of Russian election influence came principally from the , LLC (IRA), a Russian organization funded by Yevgeniy Viktorovich Prigozhin and companies he controlled, including Concord Management and Consulting LLC and Concord Catering (collectively "Concord").

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The IRA and its employees began operations targeting the United States as early as 2014. Using fictitious U.S. personas, IRA employees operated social media accounts and group pages designed to attract U.S. audiences.

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By early to mid-2016, IRA operations included supporting the Trump Campaign and disparaging candidate Hillary Clinton. ...Some IRA employees, posing as U.S. persons... communicated electronically with individuals associated with the Trump Campaign and with other political activists to seek to coordinate political activities, including the staging of political rallies.

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By the end of the 2016 U.S. election, the IRA had the ability to reach millions of U.S. persons through their social media accounts. Multiple IRA-controlled Facebook groups and Instagram accounts had hundreds of thousands of U.S. participants. IRA-controlled Twitter accounts separately had tens of thousands of followers, including multiple U.S. political figures who retweeted IRA-created content.

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Fourth, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment.

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Our obstruction-of-justice inquiry focused on a series of actions by the President that related to the Russian-interference investigations, including the President's conduct towards the law enforcement officials overseeing the investigations and the witnesses to relevant events.

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The key issues and events we examined include the following:

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Overarching factual issues. We did not make a traditional prosecution decision about these facts, but the evidence we obtained supports several general statements about the President's conduct.

— Mueller Report