Special Counsel Robert Mueller is ready to testify before Congress. And there are still a lot of questions left about the Russia investigation. Mueller has previously swore off answering the most pressing one—whether President Trump broke the law. But there’s still a lot more we don’t know about the case, like who else is under investigation, and does Russia have leverage over Trump?
Is Trump fair game for future prosecutors? The gist of Mueller’s impromptu statement seemed like a punt to Congress: The special counsel’s office did its job, the rest is up to lawmakers. As Mueller said at the press conference and in the report, the special counsel’s office didn’t make a charging decision because standing policy in the Department of Justice is that a sitting president can’t be indicted.
Mueller made a pointed reference to the DOJ’s guidance that “a process other than the criminal justice system” was necessary to determine if the president is guilty of a crime, which sounded an awful lot like him saying it was up to Congress to charge or not charge Trump with attempting to obstruct justice.
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But there’s at least one other theoretical possibility, too. “Sitting” is the operative word in the DOJ policy about whether a president can be indicted. While it’s uncharted legal territory, it’s at least theoretically possible that future prosecutors could take up the case once Trump leaves office. Does Mueller think that’s a good idea? Well, his report said “we conducted a thorough factual investigation in order to preserve the evidence when memories were fresh and documentary materials were available.” So is the sell-by date on the case the day Trump leaves office or is it still good for a little while after?
Was Don Jr. subpoenaed? And, if not, why? Donald Trump Jr.’s name appears at least 155 times throughout the Mueller Report. He’s a key witness in a number of episodes, like the Trump Tower meeting where a Russian lawyer offered “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, courtesy of the Russian government, and allegedly got briefed by Michael Cohen on the progress of the Trump Tower Moscow project well into 2016. The Senate Intelligence Committee asked Don Jr. to come back and clear a few things up as recently as a few weeks ago and at some political cost to the committee’s Republican chairman.
Given all of that, you might expect that the special counsel’s office wanted to sit down with Don Jr., too, and ask him a few questions of their own. But there’s no outward sign that prosecutors ever met with him and footnotes in the report offer no hints of an interview with the presidential scion. Mueller sought (and didn’t get) an interview with the president. So why not Junior?
Were the other “efforts to interfere” directed from Moscow or freelance projects? The first volume of the Mueller report deals with a handful of incidents in which Russian nationals or their apparent intermediaries pitched the Trump campaign with offers of assistance. These initiatives, Mueller said, were “efforts to interfere in our political system” in addition to the Russian troll farms, hacks of Democratic campaign emails, and releases laundered through WikiLeaks. But were they directed by Moscow or just initiatives from those looking to ride a would-be president’s coattails?
It’s particularly important to understand the case of Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese professor who first tipped off Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos about Russia potentially having dirt on Clinton. According to the Mueller Report, the FBI’s investigation into whether the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia began when a foreign government—widely reported as Australia—told American officials that Papadopoulos “had received indications from the Russian government that it could assist” the campaign by releasing damaging information.
Mifsud, according to the report, was in contact with Russian nationals who had worked at the Internet Research Agency in charge of Moscow’s social media propaganda campaign. Did Mifsud really have advance knowledge of the Clinton leaks or was he just bullshitting? Was he courting a Trump adviser for his own purposes or doing it on behalf of the Russian government? Mueller certainly isn’t talking but we might get answers by way of the Justice Department’s new investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation.
What’s in those referrals? The Mueller Report contains an appendix that mentions that the special counsel’s office referred 14 cases to federal prosecutors. We know for a fact what two of those were: Cohen’s illegal hush-money payments to silence Trump’s purported mistresses, as well as financial fraud, and Greg Craig, the former Obama White House counsel charged with lying about his alleged lobbying for the former Ukrainian government.
That leaves a dozen mystery referrals into Trump World associates and those in its outer orbits. We don’t know who the subject of those referrals are but we do have at least a general idea that some of them may concern attempts from governments other than Russia to interfere in American politics.
Sources told The Daily Beast in February that Mueller had accumulated a wealth of information about a number of Middle Eastern governments’ efforts to influence the campaign. Towards that end, House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) made a criminal referral regarding Trump campaign adviser Erik Prince to the Justice Department, alleging that Prince misled Congress about whether his 2017 meeting with Russian and Emirati officials was arranged in advance.
Prosecutors in New York have also investigated whether a Trump campaign inaugural breakfast with foreign officials in New York may have violated campaign finance rules as part of its broader investigation of the inaugural committee, but it’s unclear whether or not the investigation is the result of a referral from the special counsel.
What about that counterintelligence investigation? The New York Times first reported in January that Trump’s decision to fire FBI director James Comey prompted then-deputy director Andrew McCabe to open a counterintelligence investigation into whether the president was a Russian agent. McCabe confirmed the investigation during his February book tour, as well as the fact that he had briefed congressional leaders about opening it. But since then we haven’t heard much about it. Schiff told The Daily Beast back in March that he was trying to get answers from the intelligence community about whether it was still active because he believed Trump’s finances were a “grave counterintelligence concern even if they’re not criminal.” So did the counterintelligence investigation end with or before the special counsel's investigation—or is it ongoing?
