U.S. Attorney General William Barr speaks about the release of the redacted version of the Mueller report as Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, right, and acting Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Ed O’Callaghan listen at the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., April 18, 2019. (Win McNamee\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The 448-page document, released after a nearly two-year-long inquiry, says Mueller\u2019s investigation did not establish the Trump campaign \u201cconspired or coordinated\u201d with the Russian interference effort, which was described as \u201csweeping and systematic.\u201d The report drew no conclusion as to whether the president or his aides had engaged in obstruction of justice.<\/p>\n
Trump was more than pleased by the findings, praising the report and tweeting several times \u201cNo Collusion \u2014 No Obstruction\u201d on Thursday. As expected, Democrats did not share the view, with congressional leaders calling for Mueller to testify before the House of Representatives and the Senate.
The head of a Russian government-owned bank brought Kushner an unusual gift.
During the meeting, Kushner said the incoming administration wanted \u201cto start afresh with U.S.-Russian relations\u201d and asked Kislyak for a contact close to Putin. In December, Kislyak asked for a second meeting, but this time Kushner wasn\u2019t as eager, instead saying one of his assistants, Avi Berkowitz, could attend in his stead. During that meeting, Kislyak told Berkowitz that he had a contact in mind for Kushner: Sergey Gorkov, the chairman of the Russian-government owned Vnesheconombank bank.<\/p>\n
Kushner met with Gorkov the next day. Seemingly eager to create a favorable impression, Gorkov brought with him two gifts. One, according to the report, was a painting. The other was a bag of soil from the town in Belarus where Kushner\u2019s family came from. Though the report does not elaborate on the gifts or how they were received by Kushner, the dirt was likely from Navahrudak, where his paternal grandparents, Reichel and Joseph Kushner, lived. During World War II, the town was occupied by the Soviet Union and then Nazi Germany, which turned it into a ghetto. Conditions were bad and the Nazis would come in at will and kill people. Kushner\u2019s grandmother escaped through a tunnel dug by Jews and lived in the woods for nine months with her sister and father.<\/p>\n
The report talks about the U.N. Security Council vote that condemned Israeli settlement.
Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was in touch with Russia multiple times about the vote and asked Russia to vote against or delay it, but ultimately Kislyak said Russia would not do so. Trump was in touch with Egypt, which postponed the vote by a day, but ultimately voted in favor of the resolution like all the other members of the council, except the United States, which abstained.
Mueller looked into whether George Papadopoulos acted as an Israeli agent.<\/p>\n
In a section addressing whether any members of the Trump campaign were acting for foreign governments, it emerges that Mueller looked into whether George Papadopoulos, a former member of the president\u2019s foreign policy advisory panel, acted on behalf of the Israeli government. Papadopoulos and his wife had both previously made claims to the media that Mueller had probed his ties with Israel. The report confirms their accounts.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile the investigation revealed significant ties between Papadopoulos and Israel (and search warrants were obtained in part on that basis), the Office ultimately determined that the evidence was not sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction under [the Foreign Agents Registration Act] or Section 951\u201d of the tax code, the report reads.<\/p>\n
Papadopoulos, a Greek-American former Trump adviser, spent 14 days in federal prison last year for lying to the FBI. He has said he met with two Israeli businessmen in 2017 over a \u201croutine\u201d investment proposal. (Papadopolous had shown an interest in Israel\u2019s energy sector and in April 2016, just days after he was named to the Trump campaign, attended an energy conference in Israel.) Papadopoulos later accused the two men of trying to frame him. He said that an Israeli, George Tawil, introduced him to Shai Arbel, who co-founded the Israeli cyberintelligence company Terrogence, as part of a scheme to plant marked hundred dollars bills on him in order to incriminate Papadopoulos when FBI agents searched his luggage upon his return to the United States.<\/p>\n
A Russia-born think tank CEO warned Kushner about not highlighting Russia during the presidential campaign.<\/p>\n
From April 2016 until the election, Kushner was in contact and met with Dimitri Simes, the Russia-born CEO of the Washington, D.C.-based think tank Center for the National Interest. Simes, who advised Kushner on foreign policy, warned him about making sure Russia did not become an issue that could hurt Trump\u2019s campaign.<\/p>\n
\u201cSimes raised the issue of Russian contacts with Kushner, advised that it was bad optics for the Campaign to develop hidden Russian contacts, and told Kushner both that the Campaign should not highlight Russia as an issue and should handle any contacts with Russians with care,\u201d the report reads.<\/p>\n
The report also describes a meeting between the two men in August 2016, during which Simes \u201cprovided Kushner the Clinton-related information that he had promised.\u201d The next few lines of the report, which describe the information, have been blacked out for \u201cpersonal privacy.\u201d However, it states that Simes had previously written in a memo to Kushner about information regarding what he called \u201ca well-documented story of highly questionable connections between Bill Clinton\u201d and the Russian government. Kushner forwarded that memo to senior campaign staffers with the message \u201csuggestion only.\u201d
On March 3, 2017, the day after then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia inquiry, former White House counsel Don McGahn met with Trump, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and chief strategist Steve Bannon in the Oval Office. The president was angry at the Sessions recusal, saying \u201cI don\u2019t have a lawyer,\u201d and mentioning how previous attorneys general had protected the presidents under whom they served.<\/p>\n
Trump then told McGahn that he wished he had Roy Cohn, the late Jewish lawyer and notorious political fixer \u2014 not to be confused with Michael Cohen, the Jewish attorney who also served Trump as a fixer \u2013 working for him. Priebus recalled that the president described Cohn as a winner and a fixer, that Cohn would win cases for him that had no chance, and that Cohn had done incredible things for him.
At 4 p.m. on Feb. 14, 2017, following a Homeland Security briefing, Trump dismissed those gathered and asked to speak alone to FBI Director James Comey. Sessions and Kushner lingered, but the president \u201cshooed them away,\u201d along with Priebus, who had attempted to enter the room. In an interview with The New York Times on July 17, 2017, the president denied that he shooed anyone out of the room, and then deflected by asking his granddaughter Arabella Kushner, who had just entered the interview room, to say hello to the reporters in Chinese.<\/p>\n
The Mueller report, however, concludes that \u201cDespite those denials, substantial evidence corroborates Comey\u2019s account.\u201d<\/p>\n
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