WASHINGTON — Attorney General Jeff Sessions had a tenuous hold on his job when President Trump called him at home in the middle of 2017. The president had already blamed him for recusing himself from investigations related to the 2016 election, sought his resignation and belittled him in private and on Twitter. Now, Mr. Trump […]
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WASHINGTON — President Trump’s administration foreshadowed weeks, if not months, of trench warfare with Congress on Tuesday as it defied demands for documents and testimony on multiple fronts in an effort to thwart expanding investigations mounted by House Democrats. While Democrats debated the merits of pursuing impeachment against Mr. Trump, his advisers signaled that the […]
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WASHINGTON — The report by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, explored about a dozen episodes in which President Trump’s actions raised concerns about obstruction of justice. Mr. Mueller stopped short of concluding whether Mr. Trump committed that crime, but the report made clear that others can use the evidence to make that call. […]
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Two people in Wisconsin have pleaded guilty to crimes related to providing support for the Islamic State, including a woman who used hacked Facebook accounts to share instructions for building explosives and mixing poison, the authorities said Monday. Prosecutors said the two cases were unrelated. The woman, Waheba Issa Dais, 46, a permanent legal resident […]
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WASHINGTON — President Trump glanced around the room and noticed Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, then his national security adviser, with his head bent over a notebook, scribbling something down. General McMaster was a prolific note-taker, recording details for later reference, a practice that hardly seemed unusual to someone in charge of a sprawling national security […]
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Fixer. The title wasn’t a formal one, but Michael D. Cohen wholeheartedly embraced the role as a lawyer at the Trump Organization. It amounted to serving as chief problem solver for Donald J. Trump, offering Mr. Cohen an unusually up-close view of his boss’s personal and professional lives. Mr. Cohen was often at Mr. Trump’s […]
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A report of more than 400 pages detailing the investigation led by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, revealed the scope of an ambitious Russian campaign to sabotage the 2016 presidential election and explored whether President Trump engaged in acts of obstruction to impede the investigation. The report, which the Justice Department redacted before […]
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WASHINGTON — President Trump and his lawyers decided from the start to fully cooperate with the special counsel’s investigation, gambling in 2017 that they could hasten its end if they gave prosecutors unfettered access to White House aides and other Trump associates. Instead, the 448-page report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, released […]
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WASHINGTON — A sport utility vehicle with tinted windows sped into the freight garage of the office of Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, just after 7 on Thursday morning — almost to the minute when he typically arrives — concealing to photographers what was likely his arrival on the day his report was […]
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WASHINGTON — Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, praised President Trump last spring for backing the rule of law and commended the Constitution and American culture for protecting lawfulness. “I don’t think there’s any threat to the rule of law in America today,” he said at a celebration of the concept. Mr. Rosenstein left […]
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The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee issued a subpoena on Friday, demanding that the Justice Department deliver the full, unredacted version of the special counsel report by May 1, as the Russia investigation shifts from the executive branch to Congress. President Trump lashed out in a string of Twitter posts Friday morning, blasting the […]
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Lawyers and constitutional scholars will pore over the Mueller report and will find much to debate and write about. I’m confident that I’m not the only White House counsel from a past administration to read it with particular attention to the details, less technical, that illuminated the extraordinary challenge within this presidency: the relationship between […]
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WASHINGTON — The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee formally issued a subpoena on Friday demanding that the Justice Department hand over to Congress an unredacted version of Robert S. Mueller III’s report and all of the evidence underlying it by May 1. The subpoena, one of the few issued thus far by House Democrats, […]
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After the release of the special counsel’s report on Thursday, President Trump declared himself exonerated and then departed for his resort in Florida to celebrate Easter. He left behind in the capital a much more complicated assessment. The investigation will now shift from the executive branch to Congress, and the matter still appears far from […]
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After the release of the special counsel’s report on Thursday, President Trump declared himself exonerated and then departed for his resort in Florida to celebrate Easter. He left behind in the capital a much more complicated assessment. The investigation will now shift from the executive branch to Congress, and the matter still appears far from […]
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WASHINGTON — Minutes after the Justice Department released the special counsel’s report on the inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible obstruction of justice by President Trump, Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, delivered his own verdict: Case closed. “It is time to move on,” Mr. McCarthy said in a rapid-fire […]
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WASHINGTON — In the deep leather chairs of Manhattan’s luxurious Grand Havana Room late on Aug. 2, 2016, Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign chairman, met with an associate who has been linked to Russian intelligence and discussed a plan to give Moscow control over part of eastern Ukraine. “All that is required to start the […]
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WASHINGTON — As President Trump met with advisers in the Oval Office in May 2017 to discuss replacements for the F.B.I. director he had just fired, Attorney General Jeff Sessions slipped out of the room to take a call. When he came back, he gave Mr. Trump bad news: Robert S. Mueller III had just […]
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So much for “complete and total exoneration.” To the contrary, it turns out that Robert Mueller and his team of prosecutors and investigators found “substantial evidence” that President Trump broke federal law on numerous occasions by attempting to shut down or interfere with the nearly-two-year Russia investigation. In addition to pointing to possible criminality, the […]
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The Mueller report is like a legal version of a thriller movie in which three malevolent forces are attacking a city all at once. Everybody’s wondering if the three attackers are working together. The report concludes that they weren’t, but that doesn’t make the situation any less scary or the threat any less real. The […]
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