After January 3, when the new Democratic majority in the House was seated, every day was a possible or even likely day for the delivery of the special counsel’s report on his investigation of the president. Weeks went by, yet there was still no sign of the report; by late February, its already magical properties as a potential game changer and Trump killer seemed compounded beyond all reason. Many felt the delay must mean that Robert Mueller had found a bottomless landfill of misdeeds, forcing him to dig ever deeper into the dark character and twisted dealings of Donald Trump.
For Trumpers, the fact that the report remained undelivered sat uneasily in the pit of their stomachs, their sense of foreboding increasing as time went by. A telling gauge was Jared Kushner’s lawyer Abbe Lowell. For months, Lowell had been saying with absolute certainty that his client was safe—that he had gotten him off—but now Lowell appeared to have gone to ground. The silence seemed eerie.
Kushner, meanwhile, was painting a grim scenario. Even if, in the absolute best case, no high campaign officials—Kushner himself, Flynn, Manafort, Donald Trump Jr., not inconceivably even the president—were indicted for conspiracy, they could almost certainly expect a devastating critique of the campaign’s careless conduct and its casual willingness, if not eagerness, to accept Russian help. Mueller’s report was equally likely to enumerate, in painful detail, the Trump family’s craven pursuit of its own interests during the campaign. As for obstruction, Kushner was yet hoping he would escape, but he assumed that his brother-in-law, Don Jr., would not, and that the president would, at the very least, be named as an unindicted coconspirator. Even without indictments, the report would weave a damning narrative bearing directly on Donald Trump’s fitness to be president.
Where you were when the report was delivered would, Steve Bannon had begun to think, rank up there in a historic context with where you were when 9/11 happened. Here was, after all, a systematic review of the Trump presidency. Here would be Donald Trump reduced to existential essence. In a way, the judgment that Donald Trump had avoided all his life was finally to be rendered. And no one, least of all Bannon, believed that Trump would be found to be anything but Trump.
The runaway train was about to hit the wall.
The wings were about to come off the aircraft.
But where was the report?
In fact, it was all but complete by early January. Most members of Mueller’s staff were already planning their exits. The once collegial mood among the nineteen attorneys who had worked on the investigation had turned, at best, sullen. Two years of investigation and internal debate had reduced the special counsel’s broad mandate to a prudent, carefully defined pair of issues. Had the president or members of his inner circle conspired with Russian state agents to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election? And if that “predicate event” did not occur, could the president—no matter how determined his attempts to disrupt the investigation of him—be fairly accused of obstructing justice?
Bob Mueller did not want to file his report with Matthew Whitaker, the acting attorney general. He decided to wait for William Barr, the president’s nominee for attorney general, to be confirmed and seated. Shortly after Barr took up his new post on February 14, he conveyed his view that the protocol was for the attorney general to request the report from the special counsel—and he wasn’t yet requesting it. Barr did not want the report until after the president held his summit with the North Koreans in Vietnam at the end of February. He might not ask for it, in fact, until after the planned summit with President Xi of China at the end of March.
The consideration here was the new attorney general’s desire to put the nation’s critical business first. But the reality was, too, that Barr was bracing himself and looking to get situated in his new office before facing the anticipated Mueller explosion.
On Capitol Hill, breathless anticipation was turning to frustration and irritation. On March 4, the House Judiciary Committee ran out of patience and decided to issue information requests to eighty-one individuals and organizations. The committee would begin its own investigation without further delay.
The move by the Judiciary Committee, with the clear message that the Democratic House was now setting its own timetable, forced Barr’s hand. On March 5, the attorney general and the special counsel conferred, with Mueller spelling out his report’s conclusions.
On March 14, the prospective Trump-Xi summit at Mar-a-Lago was postponed. The attorney general then officially requested the report by the end of the following week: the hard deadline was now Friday, March 22.
That same day, the fourteenth, Andrew Weissmann, Bob Mueller’s key deputy, announced that he was leaving the special counsel’s office. Weissmann had promised to see the investigation through to the end. But now, bitterly disappointed, he would tell friends, by how narrowly Mueller had come to focus the scope of the investigation, he wanted to stay not a moment longer.
Robert Mueller, the stoic marine, had revealed himself over the course of the nearly two-year investigation to his colleagues and staff to be quite a Hamlet figure. Or, less dramatically, a cautious and indecisive bureaucrat. He had repeatedly traveled between a desire to use his full authority against Donald Trump and the nagging belief that he had no such authority. He could be, he knew, the corrective to the louche and corrupt president; at the same time, he asked himself, what right did he have to correct the country’s duly elected leader? On the one hand, you could indict the president for acting as if he were above the law; the secret draft indictment outlining the president’s casual abuses had been on Mueller’s desk for almost a year. On the other hand, a reasonable man might, in certain nuanced ways, see aspects of the presidency as indeed above the law.
In some sense, here was an unintended result of the exceptional silence of the special counsel’s office: it had lived entirely inside its own head. Setting itself apart from public discussion, it had come to dwell in its own ambivalence—or Bob Mueller’s ambivalence. For the special counsel, doing the right thing became doing as little as possible.
Mueller let it be known that as concerned as he was with Donald Trump, he was equally concerned with Ken Starr, the independent counsel who investigated Bill Clinton. As Mueller kept reminding his staff, there were substantial differences between a special counsel and independent counsel. The special counsel’s office was not independent: it worked directly for the Justice Department. Moreover, Mueller believed that Starr, with his leaky office, agenda-driven investigation, and visceral hatred of Bill Clinton, had undermined the office of the presidency.
Ken Starr had forced Bill Clinton to testify before the grand jury. Deciding whether to subpoena the president became perhaps the central fault line in the Mueller investigation—and when the special counsel decided not to subpoena the president, he overrode the will of much of his staff. Here, part of Mueller’s analysis was not just about the special counsel’s limited authority; it was also a recognition on his part that it would somehow not be a fair fight to make the president testify, because Trump would surely incriminate himself.
In a way, Robert Mueller had come to accept the dialectical premise of Donald Trump—that Trump is Trump. It was circular reasoning to hold the president’s essential character against him. Put another way, confronted by Donald Trump, Bob Mueller threw up his hands. Surprisingly, he found himself in agreement with the greater White House: Donald Trump was the president, and, for better or for worse, what you saw was what you got—and what the country voted for.
But the president did not know any of this yet. A heads-up about the contents of the report was reaching some in the White House, but there was a careful effort to keep this intelligence from the uncontainable president, lest his celebrations begin before the process was complete. He remained, in the same description offered by three different allies, “batshit crazy” right up until the end. His tweeting, always barely under control, reached obsessive-compulsive levels during the weekend before the report’s deadline, his mental agitation on vivid display. And yet he remained convinced that he was going to prevail, or, anyway, that Bob Mueller did not have the guts to stand up to him. His enemies might have elevated Mueller to a hero, but Trump still regarded him as a zero.
Curiously, in the days leading up to the formal delivery of the report, one of the people with whom the president frequently spoke was his old friend and campaign contributor Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots. In February, Kraft had been charged with soliciting a prostitute while visiting a massage parlor in Palm Beach, Florida.
Trump seemed to find comfort in counseling his friend on his legal peril, offering him copious amounts of advice and maintaining that he was much better at this than any lawyer. He knew what to do. He knew how to handle it. They always wanted you to plead out. But don’t give an inch. “You’re innocent,” he said, even though the police had Kraft on a video tape at the massage parlor.
At the close of business on March 22, the Mueller report was at last delivered. The grand jury, sitting on this Friday, issued no indictments, and the special counsel’s office confirmed that its investigation would not yield any new indictments.
It was unclear how long or how involved the report was. It was unclear how much of the work product of the twenty-two-month effort had been sent to the attorney general. But almost immediately after accepting the report, Attorney General Barr wrote a letter to Congress expressing confidence that he could quickly provide a summary of the special counsel’s findings, possibly within forty-eight hours.
A chill went through the establishment. Perhaps there wasn’t all that much to the report.
In a sense, this was the central question: How much had Bob Mueller reduced the scope of his inquiry? What if his two years had been spent not working to build his investigation, but working to limit it?
On Sunday, late on a spring-like afternoon, sixty-four degrees in Washington, the attorney general sent his summary of the report to Congress. In a four-page letter, Barr said that the special counsel had failed to find evidence of a conspiracy to influence the 2016 election between Trump or his aides and representatives from the Russian government. Further, while the special counsel had found evidence of possible obstruction of justice, he had left it to the attorney general’s discretion whether to pursue the issue. In his letter, Barr said he had made the determination that the evidence did not warrant prosecution.
Elliptically, the letter added, “During the course of his investigation, the Special Counsel also referred other matters to other offices for further action.” Indeed, there were now as many as a dozen other federal and state inquiries involving the Trump White House, the Trump Organization, the Trump family, and Donald Trump himself. The potential crimes being investigated included money laundering, campaign finance fraud, abuse of the president’s pardon power, corruption involving inaugural funds, lying on financial disclosures, and bank fraud.
But for now, Donald Trump seemed to have slipped his pursuers. As an amused Steve Bannon commented, “Never send a marine to do a hit man’s job.”
By Sunday evening, a feeling perhaps most reminiscent of election night 2016, desolate and confounded, spread through the mainstream media, the liberal establishment, and among all those who were confident that they had surrounded Donald Trump and left him nowhere to run. This was—and there could hardly be any better illustration—defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.
Almost immediately, Trump was publicly proclaiming his “complete and total exoneration.” Soon he was on the phone seeking congratulations, taking congratulations, and congratulating himself.
“Who’s the man? I’m the man. I am the man,” he said to a well-wisher. He went on about his toughness, ferocity, and strategic acumen. He restated his constant point: “Never, never, never give in. Weakness is what they wait for. Fear. I am fearless. They know that. I scared the shit out of them.”
He continued with imprecations against the Democrats and the media, and again launched a long and bitter recapitulation of the pee-tape accusations. And then he delivered a scornful critique of Robert Mueller: “What an asshole.”
And there, perhaps, Trump had something of a point. If this was the result—a pass on conspiracy and equivocation on obstruction—how could you not have hastened it along, or, worse, how could you have fostered the exact opposite impression? For two years, the secret tribunal had let the nation assume Trump’s peril and guilt. How had it taken twenty-two months to grill a nothing burger?
“Am I safe?” Trump persisted in asking the caller. “Am I safe?”
He answered his own question: “They are going to keep coming after me.”
Here was one of the most seismic reversals in American political life—and yet, for Donald Trump, it was not out of the ordinary at all. Once again, he had dodged a potential death blow. But his “exoneration” changed little because he was still guilty of being Donald Trump. It was not only that his very nature would continue to repulse a majority of the nation, as well as almost everybody who came into working contact with him, but it would lead him again and again to the brink of personal destruction.
His escape, such as it was, would be brief.