Paul Wood

What to expect from the Mueller report

President Trump seems to be enjoying his presidency, for a change. His Twitter feed betrays none of the nervousness of the tense weekend when Mueller submitted his findings to the attorney general, William Barr. Then, for an extraordinary and probably unprecedented 24 hours, Trump’s Twitter fell almost silent. Now he writes, joyously: ‘No Collusion – No Obstruction!’ Perhaps this is not just spin and Trump really believes he has been proven innocent and can cruise towards the Republican nomination in 2020 and on to a second term.

Or can he? Mueller simply set out ‘facts’ on both sides of the question of whether the President had obstructed justice – when he fired James Comey as director of the FBI, to deal with the ‘Russia thing’, and when he tweeted to attack Mueller’s prosecutors as ’13 angry Democrats’. (They’re now ‘18 angry Democrats’ in the latest tweets.)

Barr has decided the column of facts labelled ‘Prosecute’ is shorter, or less weighty, than the column labelled ‘Do not prosecute’ – but Congress may think differently. When Barr was appointed, a former federal prosecutor told me he would be ‘the people’s lawyer, not Trump’s lawyer’. It’s fair to say, however, that Barr has so far set the agenda in a way that suits the President.

Mueller did not ‘establish’ there had been collusion between Team Trump and Russia according to the very high standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt in a criminal case. But just four incomplete sentences – fewer than 90 words – of Mueller’s made it into Barr’s letter to Congress. There are some 400 pages of the report altogether. What else is in there? When a FISA warrant was issued for surveillance of a Trump campaign advisor, Carter Page, the court was reportedly told: ‘The FBI believes that the Russian Government’s efforts are being coordinated with Candidate #1’s campaign…’ Candidate #1 was of course Donald Trump.

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Written by
Paul Wood
Paul Wood was a BBC foreign correspondent for 25 years, in Belgrade, Athens, Cairo, Jerusalem, Kabul and Washington DC. He has won numerous awards, including two US Emmys for his coverage of the Syrian civil war

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