Here’s my quick and early take on what’s in the Mueller report. I’m still slogging through the details, but here are a few things I’ve found. A lot of this we already know from the past three years of solid reporting on it, and a lot of the obstructive actions occurred in public right in front of our faces. But the report does fill in some details that are new to me.

Reading through it, it strikes me that the FBI told both the Clinton and Trump campaigns that Russia was attempting to interfere in the elections and told both campaigns to alert them immediately if they were approached by Russians. Mueller outlines numerous Russian contacts with the Trump campaign and the campaign did not report even one to the FBI.

1. The released Mueller report is about 448 redacted pages. Here’s a searchable version of the report.
2. About half of the report covers the collusion aspect and goes into details about contacts between Trump campaign members or associates and Russian officials and oligarchs. The other half covers around a dozen attempts by Trump to potentially obstruct justice.
3. The report confirms most of the news stories we’ve read over the past three years, but does contradict a few. For example, there is no evidence that Michael Cohen traveled to Prague or that Trump directly told him to lie in his testimony.

FISA Warrant and Intelligence Investigation

1. The report clearly says that the FBI investigation into Trump’s campaign was launched not from the Steele Dossier, but from George Papadopoulos’s drunken brag to an Australian diplomat, who later reported the incident to intelligence officials.
2. IMO, it took George Papadopoulos less than a month of being on the campaign to blow everything up. He was like throwing in a grenade. He actively worked to meet with Russians, tried to get campaign members to meet with Russians, and he spilled the beans about Russia claiming to have private Clinton documents that could help Trump. And that’s what started the investigation into the campaign.

Russian Interference and Possible Coordination

1. Mueller found a sweeping effort by Russia to interfere in our 2016 elections through social media, political and activist events, hacking and releasing Democratic emails and documents, trying to hack into our state election systems, traveling to the U.S. to obtain information, and initiating contacts with Trump campaign members and associates.
2. Russia is behind the online personas Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks, through which they published their stolen materials.
3. By 2016, Russian efforts were focused on lifting Trump (and sometimes Bernie Sanders) and disparaging Clinton.
4. Mueller found that the Trump campaign and associates welcomed Russia’s assistance and showed interest in the hacked material. He also found that even though there were numerous contacts between the Russia and Trump associates, there isn’t sufficient evidence to support conspiracy or coordination of efforts.

• • I’m beginning to think Lindsey Graham was right when he said Trump couldn’t have colluded with Russia because “he doesn’t collude with his own government.”

5. The Trump campaign knew about upcoming dumps of hacked material and had a social media, press, and PR strategy prepared to capitalize on the release.
6. Within hours of Trump publicly calling for Russia to find Clinton’s 30,000 ‘lost’ emails, they tried to hack into her personal server for the very first time.
7. There were several points of contact between the campaign and Russian oligarchs and officials. For example:

• • Michael Cohen, Donald Trump Sr., Donald Trump Jr., and Ivanka worked periodically on Trump Tower Moscow.
  • Paul Manafort was in frequent contact with Konstantin Kilimnik and shared campaign, polling, and strategy information with him.
  • The aforementioned George Papadopoulos.
  • The Trump Tower meeting with Russian lawyer Veselnitskaya plus two other Russians. Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort were in attendance. (This one posed a difficult legal question for Mueller’s team not over whether the action was wrong, but over whether it was willful.)
  • Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak had contacts with Jeff Sessions, Jared Kushner, Michael Flynn, and campaign advisor J. D. Gordon.
  • Michael Flynn also discussed sanctions with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, and according to Flynn this was in coordination with the Trump transition team.
  • Kushner met with Sergey Gorkov, head of a Russian-government-owned bank.
  • Several campaign associates were in contact with Dmitry Simes, CEO of CNI (a think tank with expertise in and ties to the Russian government).
  • Erik Prince met with Kirill Dmitriev in the Seychelles. Dmitriev also met with an associate of Jared Kushner named Rick Gerson.
  • Carter Page took trips to Russia, speaking at the New Economic School twice, and had several contacts with Russians, including contacts prior to the campaign with two agents who attempted to recruit him.

8. Of note, the above lied to cover up pretty much every single one of their meetings, and several people were charged, convicted, or pleaded guilty to that.
9. Russia released a dump of stolen emails and other material within an hour of the release of the Access Hollywood tape of Trump boasting about sexually abusing women.
10. Mueller‘s investigation found that a Florida county’s election server network was breached, seemingly through a spearphishing effort. There’s no evidence any votes were changed, though. (Score one for former Florida Senator Bill Nelson, who made this claim on the heels of his tight loss to Rick Scott. The majority of politicians and MSM dismissed his claim at the time.)
11. Mueller also confirms that Russians breached the Illinois State Board Of Elections computer network by exploiting a vulnerability in their website.
12. The FBI opened an investigation into Russian interference and possible coordination with the Trump campaign in July 2016, and in 2017, three congressional committees opened investigations.
13. Russian agents and entities violated criminal law with their interference. One company, Concord, has been fighting this in court, but the others will likely never be arrested.

Potential Obstruction of Justice

1. In Volume II, Mueller looks at several actions taken by Trump that could be construed as obstruction of justice. Much of this occurred in the public eye, so we can verify they happened. Here are a few of Trump’s potentially obstructive actions:

• • Lying about his ties to Russia.
  • Asking Comey to end the investigation.
  • Firing Comey.
  • Asking White House Counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller (over which McGahn threatened to resign).
  • Telling McGahn to lie about his request to fire Mueller.
  • Trying to stop Jeff Sessions from recusing himself from the investigation.
  • And then trying to get Sessions to unrecuse himself.
  • Trying to get Mueller to only focus on future elections.
  • Telling Corey Lewandowski to deliver a message to Sessions saying Sessions should tell the public that the investigation was very unfair to Trump and that Trump did nothing wrong.
  • Lying about the Trump Tower meeting. Oddly, this one seems to be the weakest case for obstruction.
  • Pushing top officials to publicly say his team didn’t collude with Russians, even though it was an active investigation at the time.
  • Talking to witnesses about their testimony, specifically Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort.
  • Attempting to influence Paul Manfort’s jury.
  • Publicly attacking Michael Cohen and his family after he started cooperating.
  • Interactions with his personal lawyer (Michael Cohen) over his testimony to Congress. Apparently Trump’s lawyers helped form Cohen’s testimony, but Mueller didn’t establish that Trump actually told him to lie.

2. The people who lied about their contacts with Russian agents listed in the previous section actually did commit obstruction of justice.
3. Lucky for Trump, multiple people whom he told to obstruct justice in some way ignored his requests (instead of explaining to him why they were wrong). This likely saved Trump from a slam-dunk case of obstruction of justice. To quote:
   “The President’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.”A few of the people who refused to obstruct: House Counsel Don McGahn, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Campaign Manager Corey Lewandowsky, White House official Rick Dearborn, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, Staff Secretary Rob Porter, FBI Director James Comey, Deputy FBI Directory Andrew McCabe, National Security Advisor K.T. McFarland, and Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein.
4. Trump never sat down for an interview with Mueller’s team; he provided written answers instead, which were incredibly useless. He states at least 30 times that he doesn’t recall. The report also says they didn’t subpoena him in the end because the White House would continue to delay and Mueller thought it better to wrap up the investigation as they weren’t likely to find out anything new.
5. Trump was concerned that talk about Russian interference would make his presidency look illegitimate.

Ongoing Investigations

1. Mueller spun off 14 additional inquiries from his investigation, which are currently being investigated in other jurisdictions. Two that we know of involve Gregory Craig, a Manafort associate and former Obama White House lawyer, and Michael Cohen. The other 12 are redacted.
2. Mueller also transferred 11 cases in progress to be wrapped up by other prosecutors.
3. In all, 15 people have been indicted in this and related cases, plus 25 Russian nationals and three Russian organizations (including Internet Research Agency (IRA) and Concord Management and Consulting LLC).

Lies Our Press Secretaries Told

The report exposes a few lies from our White House press secretaries:

1. Spicer lied when he said the decision to fire Comey was all Rod Rosenstein’s. Sanders also lied about who was involved in the firing. According to the report, it was Trump’s decision with several people weighing in after the decision was made.
2. Sanders lied about the timing of the decision to fire Comey.
3. Spicer lied about who decided to fire Michael Flynn.
4. Sanders lied when she said countless FBI agents had lost faith in Comey. She later excused this by saying it was a “slip of the tongue,” though the damage on that one is done and done.
5. Sanders lied when she said Trump “certainly didn’t dictate” the Trump Tower meeting statement for Donald Jr.

Conclusions

1. In the end, Mueller finds there isn’t sufficient evidence to support criminal charges for coordination or conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign on Russia’s interference in the election (though he does say some communications were destroyed, and subjects of the investigation used encrypted apps or apps that don’t store data to communicate). To quote:
   

   “Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

2. Mueller declines to prosecute on the obstruction charges, and instead lays out the legality of each attempt and leaves it to Congress to decide what to do next (as a reminder, Congress is the arm of government that constitutionally serves as a check and balance to the president). Mueller includes a pretty large section on the responsibilities of Congress as put forth in the constitution around this issue. Again, to quote:

   “With respect to whether the President can be found to have obstructed justice by exercising his powers under Article II of the Constitution, we concluded that Congress has authority to prohibit a President’s corrupt use of his authority in order to protect the integrity of the administration of justice.”

   And

   “The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the President’s corrupt exercise of the powers of office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.”

3. In the report, Mueller says they declined to prosecute Trump on obstruction not because there isn’t enough evidence to do so, but rather because of DOJ rules around indicting a sitting president. Volume II of the report plainly outlines possible crimes and gives Congress a clear path toward impeachment should they choose to go that route.

• • The report also says indictment could preempt impeachment, the constitutional process to address presidential misconduct. Quoted from the report, “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state.” (So it doesn’t exactly exonerate anyone.)
  • The report also states that while a sitting president can’t be indicted, once that person is no longer in office, charges can be brought.