Mueller Investigation!

[GreyhoundFan]

1 minute ago, kpmom said:

I have to admit I'm disappointed he didn't indict Donny, Jr. and Jared.  He indicted others for lying to congress under oath.

 

Right there with ya. I've fantasized many Friday mornings about turning on the TV to see Junior, Jared, and/or Treason Barbie being perp-walked in handcuffs.

[fraurosena]

2 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Right there with ya. I've fantasized many Friday mornings about turning on the TV to see Junior, Jared, and/or Treason Barbie being perp-walked in handcuffs.

Did he though? Indict others for lying to Congress I mean. I thought that was SDNY? Or am I misremembering?

[GreyhoundFan]

"The Mueller report just dropped. Here’s what happens next."

Spoiler

Robert S. Mueller III just delivered the long-awaited and highly anticipated report on his Russia investigation to Attorney General William P. Barr.

Welcome to one of the most anti-climactic moments in modern American political history.

The truth is we don’t really know anything we didn’t know a few minutes ago, and it’s still massively unclear what we’ll learn about Mueller’s findings. In his letter to Congress Friday, Barr wrote that he remains “committed to as much transparency as possible, and I will keep you informed as to the status of my review.” He said he could deliver a summary as early as this weekend.

But it’s unclear what that will actually look like.

As Barr explained in his confirmation hearing back in February, once he received the report, he planned to summarize the parts he can for Congress and the public within the constraints of the law and Justice Department guidelines.

What does that mean? What happens next? Here’s a little primer to consult as we wait ... again.

What constrains Barr

There are a few basic things Barr may have to withhold from public view, and even potentially from Congress.

Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6 says that details of the investigation must be kept secret unless they are revealed as part of a court order related to an indictment or other proceeding. Grand jury rules prohibit the disclosure of information obtained via that method — a method Mueller has undoubtedly used extensively — unless actual charges are filed. And Barr will also have to review the report for any classified information.

It is expected that this review process could take days or even weeks.

The Catch-22

But this creates an unusual and problematic circumstance when it comes to President Trump. The Justice Department has affirmed its guidelines prohibit the indictment of a sitting president, so how will information about Trump be handled? If Trump can’t be indicted, and Barr can only disclose information related to actual charges, does that mean he can’t say much of anything about Trump’s conduct and potential obstruction of justice? Trump said Wednesday that he is fine with the full report going public, but does that even matter?

In short, we don’t know what happens. But it’s difficult to believe Barr and the Justice Department won’t have to say something about whether Mueller believed Trump’s actions rose to the level of crimes, even if he can’t be charged.

After all, Congress is the body charged with holding a president accountable, through impeachment proceedings. So it would seem at least they would somehow need to be made aware of the information required to make such decisions.

A road map? Separate reports? Releasing the whole thing?

One option that has been floated for Barr is releasing separate reports. Former Justice Department officials have suggested he could deliver two reports to Congress: One with unclassified information that could be given to all lawmakers (and would presumably leak to the public), and a separate one that would be given to a much-smaller universe of congressional leaders, such as House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), who is in charge of any impeachment efforts.

But even then, the rules described above could get in the way.

Another option would be to take a page out of history. When confronting a somewhat similar set of circumstances during Watergate, special prosecutor Leon Jaworski used a workaround: Rather than make recommendations to Congress and pass along all his findings, he transmitted through a grand jury what became known as the Watergate “road map.” It was a bare-bones set of facts and guideposts for them to conduct their own inquiries and draw their own conclusions. The move was authorized by a federal judge and could provide an important legal precedent for Barr.

A third eventual result would be that the full report, or something amounting to it, eventually finds its way out. House Democrats have said they will press for the whole thing. The House voted 420-0 to make the report public, and Trump said this week, “Let people see it.” But how Congress feels may not matter. They can’t simply pass a law to force the report’s release, given that would conflict with other federal laws. If they were to get extensive details of Mueller’s findings, it would likely have to come through the legal system in some fashion. They could seek a court order. They could subpoena Mueller’s documents. They could call Mueller to testify. They could do all of the above and more.

In short, Mueller has conducted a highly secretive investigation, whose inner workings have often been revealed only months after key events took place. And just as we don’t really know what he’s found, we don’t know what the endgame will be even now that the report has been written and transmitted. This could go in a whole bunch of different directions, with a relatively new attorney general in charge of it all.

 

[onekidanddone]

Oh shit somebody needs to hide the codes. 

22 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Right there with ya. I've fantasized many Friday mornings about turning on the TV to see Junior, Jared, and/or Treason Barbie being perp-walked in handcuffs.

Don’t forget Eric 

[HerNameIsBuffy]

Waste of tax dollars … Trump and his supporters vindicated.  

 

[kpmom]

33 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Did he though? Indict others for lying to Congress I mean. I thought that was SDNY? Or am I misremembering?

No, you're right, I was wrong.  Mueller passed evidence to SDNY, I believe.

So...does that mean we still might see the Trump spawn (and spawn-in-law) doing a perp walk? ?

[HerNameIsBuffy]

4 minutes ago, kpmom said:

So...does that mean we still might see the Trump spawn (and spawn-in-law) doing a perp walk? ?

nope.

[Satan'sFortress]

38 minutes ago, HerNameIsBuffy said:

Waste of tax dollars … Trump and his supporters vindicated.  

 

Wait . . . what?  Paul Manafort?  Michael Cohen?  Roger Stone? Michael Flynn? George Papadopoulos?

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/21/us/mueller-trump-charges.html?module=inline

Quote

Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating possible links between the Trump campaign and Russian officials, has issued more than 100 criminal counts against dozens of people, including six Trump advisers or officials.
 

 

39 minutes ago, kpmom said:

No, you're right, I was wrong.  Mueller passed evidence to SDNY, I believe.

So...does that mean we still might see the Trump spawn (and spawn-in-law) doing a perp walk? ?

Of course, absolutely.

[HerNameIsBuffy]

1 minute ago, Satan'sFortress said:

Wait . . . what?  Paul Manafort?  Michael Cohen?  Roger Stone? Michael Flynn? George Papadopoulos?

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/21/us/mueller-trump-charges.html?module=inline

 

Of course, absolutely.

thanks.  that's important to remember.

[Dandruff]

1 hour ago, Satan'sFortress said:

Of course, absolutely.

They can't be pardoned by Daddy on state charges, right?

No matter what is or isn't released from that report, I expect truly incredible amounts of spin and speculation to follow.  Hope we at FJ can keep focused on the critical paths during the reactionary phase.

I'm feeling oddly down about the release of the report, even though nothing is directly known.  Not sure why.  I do have a lot of other things on my mind, so maybe it's a spillover from that.  I also probably don't understand the process enough, or trust politicians enough, to have faith that the outcome will really be appropriate to the circumstances.

I hope the results will contradict my cynicism.

[GreyhoundFan]

10 minutes ago, Dandruff said:

They can't be pardoned by Daddy on state charges, right?

No matter what is or isn't released from that report, I expect truly incredible amounts of spin and speculation to follow.  Hope we at FJ can keep focused on the critical paths during the reactionary phase.

I'm feeling oddly down about the release of the report, even though nothing is directly known.  Not sure why.  I do have a lot of other things on my mind, so maybe it's a spillover from that.  I also probably don't understand the process enough, or trust politicians enough, to have faith that the outcome will really be appropriate to the circumstances.

I hope the results will contradict my cynicism.

NO presidential pardons on state charges.

I'm sure Rudy and crew are going to be spinning like tops on speed.

I agree with feeling a little down. I truly wanted a slam-bang conclusion, but that really isn't Mueller's style. I hold out hope that things aren't over, the state AGs will take over and push hard. I know there are other federal things out there too, like the inaugural committee grifting and the emoluments lawsuits.

[fraurosena]

It’s weird how anti-climactic we all feel. We have all hyped up Mueller as the great savior of American democracy — Mueller knows everything! — but we were deluding ourselves. There never was going to be a big reveal that Trump and his cronies are all crooks in cahoots with Russians. This feeling of depression we all seem to have is a consequence of a lack of them all going down at once, like dominoes falling.

However, we shouldn’t dispair. Remember that the House is now in Democratic hands and there are at least three committees investigating. And Congress has the power to remove him from office. 

We should also not forget that although there won’t be any new indictments, Rick Gates already has been. He has been cooperating with Mueller for more than a year, but he hasn’t been sentenced yet. That is still going to happen. And we have all seen that Mueller enters so called ‘speaking’ documents to the court. Even if the Mueller report is not released, we will still find out a lot of what Gates has been telling. 

Yes, there will be spinning on from the administration and from the right. It will be nauseating, and untrue. Because the story is far from over. The fat lady isn’t singing just yet. 

So, heads up, everyone. 

 

[laPapessaGiovanna]

This CNN piece is why I feel gloomy 

Quote

Was there a conspiracy to collude?

In the court of public opinion, this is the ball game. Prosecutors crafted a mosaic of how collusion could have played out. But if Mueller stops short of producing a smoking gun, President Donald Trump is sure to declare all-out victory and claim total vindication.

In politics the court of public opinion is everything. And I fear there's no "smoking gun" in the Mueller report. I think he has done a good job but probably he couldn't find nothing nothing more damning than what is already well known. And there's a lot that's known: trump is utterly unfit and deranged he gives clear demonstration of this every.single.day. And yet there he is, the disgusting orange boil that you can't get rid of. The enormous elephant in the room that the GOP and the magats are determined to ignore no mind what.

This presidency has been such a clusterfuck that we have come to wait for a proportionally  catastrophic smoking gun, when probably the worst was just under our eyes and we got used to and in some measure indifferent to it while we waited for something bigger, something that could put an happy, and quick, ending to this nightmare.

If Mueller couldn't point to the "easy" way out from the presidency, we aren't back at square one. We will just have to make the steaming pile of shit that's under everybody's nose count for what it is.

I was still thinking about the timing. This may be the "best" (or the less bad) time for the GOP to make the report public. They would be right on time to dump Trump and choose an untainted candidate for 2020. Maybe in the report there's enough shit to make them drop their insane coprophilia. Or maybe not and then the Dems will have to keep fighting inch by inch for every speckle of sanity.

[fraurosena]

Benjamin Wittes over at Lawfare has written a piece you should all read.

Most important sentence:

[...]  It’s possible, for example, that Mueller is not proceeding against certain defendants other than the president because he has referred them to other prosecutorial offices; some of these referrals are already public, and it’s reasonable to expect there may be other referrals too. In this iteration, what is ending here is not the investigation, merely the portion of the investigation Mueller chose to retain for himself. [...]

(cursives not mine)

[fraurosena]

@laPapessaGiovanna, since there is now a new, really conservative ceo at CNN, I’m not taking what they say at face value anymore. 

Here’s a Seth Abrsmson mega- thread. Because of course he has one. To anyone feeling down right now, it is a must read. He clearly lays out how ‘the investigation’ is far from over. Mueller isn’t done yet.

 

[laPapessaGiovanna]

3 hours ago, fraurosena said:

@laPapessaGiovanna, since there is now a new, really conservative ceo at CNN, I’m not taking what they say at face value anymore.

It's an op-ed so there's nothing to take at face value. It just helped me to coalesce what I have been thinking in full thoughts instead of mere sensations. I think we have to be prepared to not to expect a spectacular smoking gun, but something more like the endless pile of shit we got used to see in the news every day.

[AmazonGrace]

This. 

 

[fraurosena]

See for yourself if she cried or not:

 

[SilverBeach]

9 hours ago, fraurosena said:

since there is now a new, really conservative ceo at CNN, I’m not taking what they say at face value anymore. 

I've noticed a change, even on my favorite shows like Don Lemon. Will be spending more time over at MSNBC.

[Dandruff]

10 hours ago, fraurosena said:

This feeling of depression we all seem to have is a consequence of a lack of them all going down at once, like dominoes falling.

We're still missing a sense of impending closure - that the full nature of the stain has been identified and a cleaning crew is on its way to remove it.  We're in a position, again, where we're trusting the "system" and we know how well that worked out in 2016.

I haven't lost hope but am also trying to not be too hopeful.  I suspect that a lot of Republican politicians are considering what their stances may be to the publicized contents of the report.  I also suspect, as I believe others here have voiced, that they might abandon Trump in swarms if/when it becomes clear that he's no longer viable in office.  They know that there are other investigations in progress and they have their own families, careers, and reputations to consider.

I wonder if Pence is praying any harder today.  I don't know how he isn't constantly doubting his decision to get into this mess.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump’s legal troubles are far from over even as Mueller probe ends"

Spoiler

For 22 months, Donald Trump’s presidency has been haunted largely by one legal foe, a Washington prosecutor with seemingly unlimited power but who was also a single target for Trump to portray as the leader of an unfair “witch hunt.”

Yet even as one legal cloud lifts with the conclusion of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation, others loom large on the horizon — creating additional threats to the president’s standing as he seeks to shift attention toward his 2020 reelection campaign.

Nearly every organization Trump has run over the last decade remains under investigation by state or federal authorities, and he is mired in a variety of civil litigation, with the center of gravity shifting from Mueller’s offices in southwest Washington to Capitol Hill and state and federal courtrooms in New York, the president’s hometown and the headquarters of his company.

Federal prosecutors in New York have been investigating hush money paid before the 2016 election to two women who said they had affairs with Trump. Prosecutors in that office are also probing Trump’s inaugural committee, which raised and spent record amounts of money.

The president’s personal conduct will also be under the microscope in the coming months, when he is scheduled to sit for a deposition in a lawsuit filed in New York state by a former contestant on his reality television show who alleges Trump groped her in 2007 and then lied about it during the election.

Authorities in New York, Washington, D.C., and New Jersey are investigating a variety of issues related to Trump’s private business and charity.

Congressional Democrats have already issued dozens of requests for information about various topics related to Mueller’s investigation, the operations of Trump’s White House and Trump’s private business, and they have signaled they will press forward with those matters — even as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has said she does not favor impeachment. Their focus will probably be guided at least in part by Mueller’s findings, which were not yet known on Saturday.

“It’s the end of the beginning, but it’s not the beginning of the end,” Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.), who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, told reporters Saturday. “It’s important to remember that whatever is concluded by Robert Mueller doesn’t mean that the president and his core team are free of legal jeopardy.”

Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani said Saturday that he is not worried about the litany of ongoing legal issues.

“The president didn’t do anything wrong, and he will be vindicated on those issues, just as he has been vindicated after months of his critics talking about collusion,” Giuliani said. “They’ll be wrong again, and they have a compulsive desire to go after the president. It’s sad.”

Trump told Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo on Friday that he and his lawyers were in the dark about any investigation other than Mueller’s. “They say there are lots of things, but I don’t know about these things, okay, just so you understand,” he said.

Nonetheless, Trump, his company and his administration face challenges from the remaining investigations and lawsuits, particularly as the Democrats angling to run against him next year seek to portray the president as self-interested and corrupt.

In New York, federal prosecutors have been active on two investigations that could cause problems for Trump, his family and other close associates.

Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen pleaded guilty in August to breaking campaign finance law by arranging pre-election payments to two women who said they had extramarital affairs with Trump. Cohen told a federal judge his actions were intended to silence the women to help Trump win the election. Cohen said he had been directed by Trump, who was referred to in court documents drawn up by federal prosecutors in Manhattan as “Individual-1.”

The status of the investigation is not clear. Cohen in May will begin serving a three-year prison term for his involvement in the scheme, as well as various financial crimes and for lying to Congress about efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. When Cohen was sentenced, prosecutors announced they had reached a settlement with American Media Inc., the company that publishes the National Enquirer, for its role in paying off one of the two women — a possible sign the investigation into the payments had been concluded.

Cohen told Congress in public testimony recently that he was aware of potentially illegal behavior by Trump that he could not discuss because he believed it remained the subject of ongoing investigation by New York prosecutors.

A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan said department policy is not to confirm or comment on the existence of investigations.

Meanwhile, federal prosecutors in Manhattan in February also issued a wide-ranging subpoena to the presidential inaugural committee, the entity that organized Trump’s $107 million festivities when he took office in January 2017. The request sought documents covering nearly every aspect of the committee’s activities.

In addition, the committee has also received subpoenas from attorneys general offices in New Jersey and the District, which are each investigating whether the not-for-profit committee’s spending fulfilled its charitable aims.

Federal prosecutors are also scheduled to try one of Trump’s oldest friends and confidantes, Roger Stone, in Washington in November. Stone has been charged with lying to Congress about his efforts to find out what material WikiLeaks held before the 2016 election. The anti-secrecy site upended the campaign by publishing emails from the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta that prosecutors have said were stolen by Russian operatives.

Stone was charged jointly by Mueller’s office and prosecutors in Washington. With the end of Mueller’s probe, it appears likely the case will be taken over entirely by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.

Stone has pleaded not guilty. While Trump is not implicated in the case, the trial will showcase evidence of the Trump campaign’s inner workings.

Trump and his company are also facing a battery of investigations from state authorities in New York.

New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) is suing Trump in state court because of what the state called “persistently illegal conduct” at Trump’s 30-year-old charity, the Donald J. Trump Foundation. The suit says that Trump used the charity’s money to buy paintings of himself, to pay off legal settlements for his for-profit businesses and to give his own presidential campaign a boost during the 2016 Republican primaries.

Trump and his children Ivanka, Don Jr. and Eric have also been sued; they were all technically members of a charity board that hadn’t met since 1999, the attorney general’s office says. Trump has agreed to shutter the foundation, but the case is still pending.

In addition, Trump’s company appears to be the focus of two new state inquiries that followed the congressional testimony by Cohen. Cohen told a House committee in February that Trump had submitted inflated summaries of his assets to both insurers and would-be lenders, seeking to mislead them about the state of his net worth.

After that, state authorities sent subpoenas to Deutsche Bank and another bank that loaned money to Trump, and to Aon, Trump’s longtime insurance broker.

State investigators in both New York and New Jersey have spoken to an attorney for undocumented immigrants who worked for years at Trump’s golf clubs, according to the attorney. In January, the company fired at least 18 workers — many of them longtime employees — after an audit found that their immigration documents were fraudulent. Neither the New York nor the New Jersey attorney general has commented, nor have they confirmed that they had opened investigations.

Trump is also facing two federal lawsuits alleging that he has violated the Constitution because his private company continues to do business with foreign governments.

Trump’s D.C. hotel, down the street from the White House, has already hosted parties put on by the Kuwaiti, Azerbaijani and Philippine embassies, and it rented more than 500 rooms to lobbyists for the Saudi government starting just after the 2016 election. Trump’s hotel in Chicago has also hosted a national day celebration by the Romanian consulate. The Trump Organization has said it made $191,000 in profit from foreign governments last year and donated that amount to the U.S. Treasury. It has not specified who its foreign customers are and how much they paid in total.

The Constitution prohibits presidents from taking “emoluments” from foreign states or the governments of individual U.S. states.

One of the lawsuits was filed by the attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia. A lower-court judge said the attorneys general could ask the Trump International Hotel in Washington for information on its foreign clients, but that “discovery” process has been halted while a higher court considers Trump’s appeal.

Trump has argued that the framers of the Constitution intended only to bar outright bribes and not business transactions conducted at market rates.

Another lawsuit, filed by congressional Democrats, is also proceeding but is at an earlier stage of the legal process. If either succeeds, the plaintiffs could bring to light the Trump Organization’s list of foreign-government customers.

One of Trump’s most pressing legal perils comes from a lawsuit filed in New York by Summer Zervos, a former “Apprentice” contestant.

A New York appellate court earlier this month denied a request by Trump to dismiss the suit, allowing it to move forward.

His lawyers have said they plan to appeal, but if the ruling stands, it means Trump would probably have to sit for a deposition in the matter in coming months. He would face questions about Zervos’s allegations — she has said that Trump groped her and kissed her without consent during a 2007 encounter in a Los Angeles hotel room that she had believed was supposed to be a business meeting.

Her lawyers would probably seek to ask the president questions about his treatment of other women.

Trump could face serious consequences if he were to lie in the deposition. After all, the impeachment of President Bill Clinton began after he was accused of lying in a deposition in a civil sexual harassment suit filed by Paula Jones.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Oh FFS: "Mueller did not find evidence the Trump campaign conspired with Russia, attorney general says"

Spoiler

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III did not find that Donald Trump or his campaign schemed with Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, according to a summary of Mueller’s findings sent to lawmakers Sunday.

[Read: Attorney General Barr’s principal conclusions of the Mueller report]

“The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” says the four-page summary by Attorney General William P. Barr.

The letter notes that Mueller’s probe found no evidence of such a conspiracy “despite multiple offers from Russia-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign.”

On the question of whether the president might have sought to obstruct the high-profile investigation, Mueller’s team did not offer a definitive answer.

“The Special Counsel . . . did not draw a conclusion — one way or the other — as to whether the examined conduct constituted obstruction,” Barr’s letter to lawmakers states.

“The Special Counsel states that ‘while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him’,” the letter says, signaling that Mueller’s team apparently struggled with the issue.

“For each of the relevant actions investigated, the report sets out evidence on both sides of the question and leaves unresolved what the Special Counsel views as ‘difficult issues’ of law and fact concerning whether the President’s actions and intent could be viewed as obstruction,” the letter says.

Mueller “ultimately determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment,” Barr wrote, leaving it up to the attorney general and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein to decide whether the president had committed obstruction.

Rosenstein and Barr “concluded that the evidence developed during the special counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction of justice offense. Our determination was made without regard to, and is not based on, the constitutional considerations that surround the indictment and criminal prosecution of a sitting president,” Barr wrote.

Barr further explained that decision by writing “the report identifies no actions that, in our judgment, constitute obstructive conduct, had a nexus to a pending or contemplated proceeding, and were done with corrupt intent, each of which, under the Department’s principles of federal prosecution guiding charging decisions, would need to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt to establish an obstruction of justice offense.”

The highly anticipated summary of Mueller’s investigation was sent to Congress on Sunday. Over four pages, it described in broad terms Mueller’s work.

Brian Rabbitt, the attorney general’s chief of staff, called White House lawyer Emmet Flood and gave him a readout of the letter at 3 p.m., a senior Justice Department official said.

“That is the extent of the conversation between us and the White House on the report thus far,” the official said.

Mueller’s central mission has been to determine if Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election were aided or assisted in any way by Americans, including people close to Trump.

In all, Russian citizens interacted with at least 14 Trump associates during the campaign and presidential transition, according to public records and interviews.

Of particular concern was the interaction between a London-based professor and a low-level Trump foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos. According to court filings, the professor told Papadopoulos in April 2016 that the Russians held damaging information about Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, in the form of thousands of emails.

Mueller also dug into a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower in New York. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner met with a Russian lawyer after being told she had incriminating information on Clinton that was being offered as part of the Russian government’s support for the GOP candidate, according to emails exchanged in advance of the meeting.

The lawyer has said she was not working on behalf of the Russian government. Trump Jr. and Kushner have said she did not provide any information about Clinton at the meeting.

Seeking to answer the collusion question, Mueller has also scrutinized the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, which released batches of Democrats’ emails that U.S. investigators say were stolen by Russian intelligence officers.

Since his appointment in May 2017 as special counsel, Mueller has also wrestled with the question of whether the president attempted to obstruct justice once the FBI began investigating those close to him. Current and former White House officials who were questioned by Mueller’s investigators were repeatedly asked about how the president spoke of the investigation behind closed doors, and whether he sought to replace senior Justice Department officials to stymie the probe, according to people familiar with the interviews.

The special counsel’s work led to criminal charges against 34 people, including six former Trump associates and advisers.

On Saturday, officials said that one of those cases — that of Trump’s former deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates — will be transferred from the special counsel’s office to federal prosecutors in Washington. Gates pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy and lying to the FBI, and he continues to cooperate with prosecutors while awaiting sentencing.

A senior Justice Department official said the special counsel has not recommended any further indictments — a revelation that buoyed Trump’s supporters, even as additional Trump-related investigations continue in other parts of the Justice Department, in Congress and in New York state.

Lawmakers awaiting the findings appeared on the Sunday morning news shows, with some declaring they’d already reached their own conclusions.

On ABC News’s “This Week,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) reiterated that there was “significant evidence of collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said: “We know there was collusion. Why there’s been no indictments, we don’t know.” A senior Justice Department official said Friday that Mueller has not recommended any further indictments.

Speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Nadler said it was “way too early to speculate” about the prospect of impeaching the president. He said he still believes Trump obstructed justice, although “whether they’re criminal obstructions is another question.”

Republicans accused Democrats of trying to revive a dead investigation in order to hobble the president.

The ranking Republican on the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio), said on “This Week” that Democrats had asserted that Mueller was “right next to Jesus and can walk on water” but that “all indications are that there’s not going to be any finding of any collusion whatsoever.”

Rep. Douglas A. Collins, the senior Republican on the Judiciary Committee, pledged to fight any efforts to use Mueller’s files as a springboard for impeachment.

“It is not the Department of Justice’s job to give Chairman Nadler and the House Judiciary, or any committee in the House or in the Senate for that matter, what they want to do to go off on a purely partisan investigation that could lead to impeachment,” said Collins.

President Trump spent the weekend at his Florida resort, golfing and largely staying quiet on the investigation, which at times has threatened to consume his presidency — and which he has publicly labeled a “witch hunt.” He was scheduled to return to Washington on Sunday evening.

The president’s supporters are hopeful he will be vindicated now that Mueller’s inquiry has ended, while Democrats pledged that the special counsel’s findings will bring new focus to congressional inquiries aimed at the administration.

 

[GreyhoundFan]