As Democrats fret over whether Robert Mueller will publicly release his long-awaited report, the special counsel’s indictments so far have hinted at what the report could include — and it isn’t much.
As anticipation builds over Mueller’s report, his court records provide a roadmap of his findings “in plain view,” according to the AP — records that sketch an elaborate Russian election interference plot involving social media trolls and WikiLeaks, but fail to note any evidence of collusion.
Mueller’s official report is expected to be released soon, and Democrats have begun shifting the goalposts in anticipation that it will fail to deliver, promising to investigate Trump regardless of what Mueller has discovered.
“In plain view”
Working through publicly available court records, the AP report describes the Russians’ efforts and the Trump campaign’s alleged interest in those efforts, but it is not clear that the Russians were successful in impacting the election or if there was any direct coordination between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign. The report attempts to connect the dots between Mueller’s indictments, including by detailing how a group of Russian trolls allegedly plotted to use social media misinformation to decide an American election.
According to Mueller’s indictments of these Russian trolls, the Russians hoped to wage “information warfare against the United States of America” and spread “distrust towards the candidates and the political system in general.” They allegedly sent employees to the United States to study American politics and even bought American servers in preparation for a trolling campaign, which, by 2015, was using fake social media accounts to target Clinton.
The trolls were allegedly directed to “use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump—we support them).” Separately, hackers in Russia’s military intelligence, or GRU, phished for passwords from members of the Clinton campaign and Democrats, and ultimately succeeded in hacking into Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s email account in an event “like Watergate.”
Connecting the dots
The report goes on to say that the Trump campaign showed interest in these overtures at conspiracy from the Russians, but doesn’t say whether anything came of them. In April 2016, Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos met a Maltese professor, Joseph Mifsud, who claimed to have friends in high places in Russia, including a relative of Vladimir Putin named Olga.
Eager to climb through the ranks, the 28-year-old Papadopoulos raised the possibility of arranging a summit between the Trump campaign and Putin and, according to Mueller’s indictment, Trump “nodded with approval.” Later, Papadopoulos learned that Mifsud had “dirt” on Clinton in “thousands of emails.”
However, “the meeting never occurred” between Trump and Putin, according to Papadopoulos’ indictment, and the AP report notes that it’s a “mystery” what happened next. The report further notes the guilty plea of former Trump fixer Michael Cohen for lying to Congress about talks he had with Russians for a planned Trump Tower project in Moscow that never materialized, and it also mentions the Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer promising dirt on the Trump campaign which similarly reached a dead end.
The report also draws connections between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks, which released the emails stolen by Russian hackers in the summer of 2016. According to an indictment against Roger Stone, who has been accused of lying to Congress about WikiLeaks, a “senior Trump Campaign official was directed to contact Stone about any additional releases and what other damaging information” WikiLeaks had on Clinton.
Stone had claimed to be in the know about WikiLeaks’ “dirt’ on Clinton and exchanged text messages with Steve Bannon about them. However, the report notes parenthetically that there is “no evidence” that emails that Stone sent seeking information from two men who claimed to have connections with WikiLeaks ever actually got through to Julian Assange.
Connecting more dots, the report then turns to Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who had business connections in Ukraine and with a Russian billionaire close to Putin. Mueller’s indictments allege that Manafort shared polling information about Trump with another Russian associate, Konstantin Kilimnik, and that Manafort, seeking to leverage his work for Trump to enrich himself, offered to provide “private briefings” to the Russian billionaire that never occurred.
Manafort and Trump campaign associate Rick Gates eventually had an obscure meeting with Kilimnik at a cigar bar that ended with the men leaving separately.
No collusion
As these vague connections swirled, the story goes, Russian trolls bombarded social media with pro-Trump messages, sealing Hillary Clinton’s fate. To wit, this is the essence of the Russiagate theory: that Trump campaign officials communicated with Russians while the Kremlin waged “information warfare” — with no obvious electoral impact.
As speculation over this theory looms, numerous Trump associates have been indicted for crimes unrelated to collusion, as the AP report notes, with many of them being charged with process crimes rather than any alleged conspiracy. The report mentions Michael Flynn, charged with lying about diplomatic contacts with a Russian ambassador during the presidential transition, as well as Papadopoulos, Cohen, Gates, and Manafort, all of whom have pleaded guilty to lying to investigators.
Meanwhile, the Democrats are shifting the goalposts to ensure that Trump goes down even if Mueller’s report comes up dry otherwise. Even as the Senate has concluded that there was no collusion, House Democrats have begun to backslide, and already, Democrats are swearing to keep the investigation alive whether Mueller discovers collusion or not, and have even raised the possibility of subpoenaing Mueller to testify.
But if Mueller’s report ends up saying nothing more than what is known from his indictments so far, then — after two years of poisoning the public with an insane conspiracy theory — the Democrats and the media may finally eat crow.
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