Eleven months have passed since former special counsel Robert Mueller completed his final report for the Russia investigation: Mueller submitted his report to Attorney General William Barr on March 22, 2019, and it was subsequently released publicly in redacted form. Many other Trump-related scandals have captured the headlines since then — most notably, the Ukraine scandal and the president’s impeachment. And the Moscow Project, in a February 18 article, discusses the steps that President Donald Trump has taken to make the public forget what is in the Mueller Report.
That isn’t to say that Trump doesn’t bring up Mueller’s investigation, but when he does, he typically dismisses it as a “witch hunt” that turned up nothing of importance — which, as the Moscow Project points out, is a huge mischaracterization.
“As with the rest of the Trump team’s arguments, their attacks on the Mueller investigation continue to be both irrelevant to the charges at hand and outright false,” the Moscow Project asserts in its article. “The Mueller investigation not only resulted in 37 indictments, including eight convictions — seven of which came via guilty pleas. It also uncovered both collusion and obstruction of justice. It is vital that the public understand the truth.”
Trump recently set off yet another scandal when he lambasted the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) over a sentencing memo that recommended seven to nine years in federal prison for his long-time ally Roger Stone — seemingly inspiring the DOJ to dramatically change its position and call for a much more lenient sentence. And according to the Moscow Project, the Stone/DOJ scandal offers some insights on the Mueller Report.
“Trump and his attorney general William Barr’s efforts to derail the sentencing of Roger Stone show how far they are willing to go to distract from and cover up Trump’s personal involvement in collusion in 2016,” the Moscow Project explains. “Trump and Barr aren’t just interfering to protect Stone — they’re doing it because Stone’s indictment and the Mueller report show that Stone was acting at the direct behest of high-ranking members of the Trump campaign, including Trump himself.”
The Mueller report is 448 pages long, and many Trump allies have admitted that they never read it. Instead, they take Trump’s word that the Mueller report is a total exoneration of him — which it isn’t. Mueller concluded that the 2016 Trump campaign’s interactions with Russians didn’t rise to the level of a full-fledged criminal conspiracy, but he never said, with certainty, that there was no obstruction of justice during his investigation. Instead, Mueller asserted that official DOJ policy prohibits an indictment of a sitting president, and he left it up to members of Congress to weigh the evidence in his report for themselves.
“It is vital that the American public understand that Mueller’s report was not a failure,” the Moscow Project stresses. “It was the single most damning document ever produced about a sitting U.S. president.”