Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

It’s Trump’s conspiracy obsessed enemies who’ve been indicted by Mueller’s report

It’s seldom hard to distinguish between a liberal and a display of humility and the Mueller report isn’t going to change that. Former FBI director Robert Mueller was tasked with investigating allegations that Donald Trump’s campaign colluded with the Russian government to win the 2016 presidential election. After 22 months, 2,800 subpoenas, 500 search warrants, and 500 witnesses interviewed, the special counsel has completed his report. The full document has not been published and may never be — federal law restricts disclosure of certain material in relation to grand juries — but attorney general Bill Barr has provided Congress with a four-page précis.

Barr quotes Mueller’s overarching conclusion: ‘The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities’. Mueller determined that there were two attempts by Moscow to influence the 2016 vote: first, the work of the Internet Research Agency, a Russian disinformation group, to provoke discord through social media; second, the hacking of Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee emails and handing them to organisations including WikiLeaks. According to Barr, ‘despite multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign’, Mueller did not find evidence these offers were taken up.

The special counsel declined to find either way on the question of obstruction of justice, choosing instead to delineate the evidence available and leave it to the attorney general to reach a decision. ‘While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime,’ Mueller writes, ‘it also does not exonerate him.’ Barr, drawing on Mueller’s statement that ‘the evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference’, concludes that there is insufficient evidence to accuse Trump of obstructing justice.

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