With Trump complaining all the while about how long the special counsel's investigation was taking, several individuals associated with the Trump campaign were lying to FBI agents about the extent of their contacts with Russian-affiliated individuals. The lies "materially impaired the investigation," the 448-page report notes at page nine of the executive summary.
Trump himself lied on several occasions as he sought to conceal the extent of his efforts to derail — or, in legal parlance, obstruct — the special counsel's investigation. Trump lied, the report concludes, when he denied news reports that he had instructed White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Robert Mueller as special counsel.
The Mueller Report cites Trump's purported directive as one of the ten episodes it identified as suggesting obstruction of justice. McGahn refused what he called a "crazy shit" directive. Trump's denials notwithstanding, McGahn's accounts of the after-hours telephone conversation were consistent and corroborated by his notes, according to the report.
Sanders was fingered for one notable lie, which was also aimed at concealing Trump's obstructive efforts. She lied in the White House briefing room when she claimed to have heard from "countless" FBI agents voicing a lack of confidence in the fired FBI director James Comey. Sanders conceded to the special counsel's office that she had "no basis" for a statement that, in context, supported what was then Trump's explanation for firing Comey.
Asked on Friday [April 19] by Good Morning America's George Stephanopoulos to explain herself, Sanders minimized the lie by describing it as an unscripted "spur of the moment" reply to a reporter's question. Put differently, Sanders instinctively makes up stuff as needed to deflect reporters' questions. As of the weekend, Sanders appeared to be at no risk of admonition or dismissal for this lie or any of her others.
Attorney General William Barr, still new to Trump's orbit two months after his party-line Senate confirmation, added to the Trump playbook of deception and misdirection with a 20-minute statement about the Mueller Report before it was even released. Once released, the report showed that Barr misled or flatly lied in among other remarks depicting Trump as cooperating completely with the investigation and in describing Mueller's decision not to seek to indict the president for obstruction of justice.
Short of complete cooperation, Trump declined the special counsel's request for an in-person interview and gave written answers that the report describes as incomplete and filled with claimed lapses of recollection. Mueller considered a subpoena to force the president to testify under oath but backed off rather than take on a protracted legal fight.
Barr was also misleading in suggesting, just as he had done in his initial summary of the report a week earlier, that Mueller had left it up to him to determine whether Trump could be indicted for obstruction. Instead, Mueller bowed to the never-tested Office of Legal Counsel memo that the president is not subject to indictment while in office and followed by saying that it was up to Congress to decide what to do. "We concluded that Congress has authority to prohibit a President's corrupt use of his authority in order to protect the integrity of the administration of justice," the report states.
Barr misquoted the report when he said it found "no collusion" between the Trump campaign and the Russians. To the contrary, the report specified that "collusion" has no legal meaning and concluded more tentatively. "The investigation did not establish that the Campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities," the report states.
Still, Barr deserves some credit for congratulating the special counsel's office for confirming what Trump has never acknowledged: the systematic efforts by Russian agents to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. With that said, Barr nevertheless passed lightly over what the report calls "numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign."
As the nation's chief law enforcement officer, Barr might have been expected to highlight what the special counsel's office actually accomplished by way of prosecutions. That record puts the lie to Trump's repeated description of the investigation as a witch hunt. In fact, five Trump associates have already pleaded guilty to or been convicted of lying to the FBI or Congress: former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, former campaign advisers Rick Gates and George Papadopoulos, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and Trump's former personal attorney Michael Cohen. Meanwhile, Trump's close associate Roger Stone awaits trial on charges of making false statements.
The report lists Trump's false pre-election denials of the links between his campaign and the Russians as the beginning of his arguably obstructive conduct followed by, among other actions, the firing of Comey and the thwarted effort to remove Mueller. With those episodes detailed, the report explicitly avoids exonerating Trump, the president's claims to the contrary notwithstanding: "[I]f we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment."
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