Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Endgame May Be in Sight
Credit to Author: Garrett M. Graff| Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2018 16:13:03 +0000
History may show that Monday ranks among the most consequential days yet of Robert Mueller’s 18-month special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
As George Papadopoulos, one of the most enigmatic characters to emerge in Mueller’s investigation, reported to a Wisconsin prison Monday, a confluence of small developments may indicate that by the time he emerges from Federal Correctional Institute Oxford two weeks from now, we might know far more about the breadth of Russia's efforts—and the Trump campaign's ties to them—than we do now.
In fact, as the holiday season begins to unfold, it’s clear that Mueller knows who’s been naughty and who’s been nice.
Paul Manafort, for one, is topping the naughty list.
A report Tuesday in The Guardian claims that Manafort met with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange a few months before the group leaked the hacked emails of Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. It's a potentially explosive revelation, one that Manafort has denied.
But even before that bombshell, Manafort might have unwittingly given Mueller just the opportunity he requires to make public even more details about the former Trump campaign chair, Russia, and the Trump campaign’s activities in 2016. In a court filing Monday, Mueller's team alleged that Manafort had lied to investigators, asking the judge to move immediately to sentencing. They also said they would provide a “detailed sentencing submission,” outlining “the nature of the defendant’s crimes and lies.”
In other words, Mueller plans to quickly issue a “report” on Manafort’s activities, one that—if it’s anything like every other court document Mueller has filed—will be more informed, more knowledgeable, and more detailed than anyone anticipates.
He’s been writing the long-anticipated “Mueller Report” bit by bit, in public, since his very first court filing.
That Paul Manafort may have been caught lying again is hardly surprising: The core of the underlying charges against him—like bank fraud and tax fraud—stem from years of lies to the IRS, the government, and financial institutions. What is surprising about Manafort’s apparent misbehavior, though, is the extent to which he seemingly never internalized just how much Mueller knows. The special counsel has apparently caught Manafort twice already in embarrassing lies: When he tried to deny ghostwriting an op-ed supporting himself, prosecutors showed the court the Microsoft Word track changes edits he’d made; when he tried to align his story with a witness, Mueller’s team hit him with witness tampering charges and showed the court his encrypted text messaging conversations.
Nor is it surprising that Mueller would potentially seize the opportunity of Manafort’s plea agreement violation to introduce all manner of evidence about his misdeeds.
In fact, such a move would be entirely consistent with one of the most surprising and least noticed aspects of Mueller’s approach all along: He’s been writing the long-anticipated “Mueller Report” bit by bit, in public, since his very first court filing.
Those waiting for Mueller to issue some massive, 9/11 Commission–style report at the end of the investigation often overlook the sheer volume of detailed information Mueller has pushed into public view already. Nearly every court document he has filed has been what lawyers call a “speaking indictment,” going into deeper detail and at greater length than is strictly needed to make the case for the criminal behavior charged.
Similarly, his “criminal informations,” the indictment-like documents filed as part of guilty pleas, have often included extraneous evidence of additional, formally uncharged criminality. In former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s plea agreement, Mueller detailed how Flynn served as an unregistered foreign agent for the government of Turkey. Manafort’s criminal information—a document that often is only a few pages, the bare minimum that prosecutors and a defendant will agree upon—this fall stretched to nearly 40 pages, including voluminous details about the so-called Hapsburg group, European politicians enlisted in Manafort’s alleged scheme, information that hadn’t appeared in any of the indictments or charges against Manafort until that point.
With his major court filings, Mueller has already written more than 290 pages of the “Mueller Report.” As Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes has said, if a 9/11 Commission–style body had gathered in the wake of the 2016 election to study Russian interference, its findings would read much like Mueller’s novelistic charges against the Internet Research Agency and the military intelligence agency commonly referred to as the GRU.
Together with the charges against Michael Cohen by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York—which stemmed from findings by the Mueller investigation—the Justice Department has outlined over the course of this year two separate alleged criminal conspiracies that aided the election of Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.
But even that’s not the full story.
Mueller’s courtroom strategy—guided surely by Michael Dreeben, one of the nation’s top appellate lawyers—has been all but flawless. His prosecutors have batted away numerous challenges, and he has notched a steady stream of guilty pleas. Earlier this fall, when Manafort became the first and only of those cases to go to trial, Mueller’s team convinced a jury of his guilt in each area of crimes they charged and, according to reporting afterward, came within a single vote of conviction on all 18 charges.
And now, Manafort’s apparent dissembling has given Mueller’s team an excuse to publish everything they know about Manafort’s “crimes and lies,” whether they’ve been publicly discussed yet or not. That could potentially include new information about that mysterious 2016 Trump Tower meeting—prompted by a Russian offer to help the campaign—or details about the apparent Assange connection.
A Manafort sentencing submission, meanwhile, would sidestep the current awkward question of delivering a “Mueller Report” to the acting attorney general, Matt Whitaker, that could be suppressed politically or redacted before release.
Beyond the surprise twist in the Manafort case, a number of signs in recent weeks indicate that Mueller might be moving toward further indictments—and perhaps even some big ones, an end-of-year denouement.
Mueller’s team has reportedly been laser-focused since the spring on Trump aide Roger Stone, who has said for months that he expects to be indicted. Stone has long been suspected of contact with WikiLeaks, potentially relating to the hacked Podesta emails. Likewise, the screws have recently tightened on Stone ally and conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, whose plea deal with Mueller, The Atlantic reports, appears to have fallen through.
It’s clear that Robert Mueller knows who’s been naughty and who’s been nice.
All of which further coincides with an odd flurry of activity around Assange himself, who has lived at the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012 in self-imposed exile to avoid potential criminal charges. The ambassador who has helped protect and negotiate on Assange’s behalf since 2015 was removed from office last week by Ecuador’s president, adding to an exodus of staff who have supported Assange over the years. After the departure, WikiLeaks said Thursday on Twitter, “All diplomats known to Assange have now been terminated to transferred away from the embassy.” Similarly, WikiLeaks has tweeted that Assange’s lawyers have now been barred from visiting him.
The increasing isolation of Assange comes after news leaked earlier this month that the US has prepared criminal charges against him—leaks that apparently were confirmed by a too-hasty cut-and-paste job in unrelated court documents.
In another critical thread of the investigation, President Trump over Thanksgiving finally turned in long-awaited written answers to Mueller’s investigators. Knowing what we now know—that Mueller took no public action during the entire period while he waited for Trump’s responses—it stands to reason that Mueller wanted to avoid taking any action that might spook the president.
For instance, Manafort’s lack of cooperation happened in mid-November. The special counsel's office delayed the filing until Monday, after it had Trump’s written answers safely in hand.
And still there’s more. According to Vanity Fair, the president’s son, Donald Jr., told people earlier this month that he expects to be indicted soon—action, again, that might have been purposefully delayed until after his father turned in the answers to the “law school exam”–like questions.
Meanwhile, alleged Russian spy Maria Butina is in plea negotiations too; the charges relating to Butina and her ties to conservative gun rights groups like the NRA are technically separate from Mueller’s special counsel investigation, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she’s unrelated to his case.
Similarly, earlier this month, a number of Mueller’s prosecutors were hard at work on Veterans Day—when Michael Cohen mysteriously appeared in Washington too.
All of which is before you even get into more speculative questions, like ABC News’ recent reporting of the abnormally large number—three dozen, in fact—of sealed indictments filed over the course of the year in DC. Fully 14 of those sealed indictments have been added to court records just since August, a period where—as far we publicly know—Mueller’s investigation remained quiet.
Put all those pieces together and it’s clear the special counsel is building toward something. He knows how this story ends. The only question that remains: Who else in the Trump orbit should expect coal in their stocking, courtesy of Robert Mueller?
Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg) is a contributing editor for WIRED and the coauthor of Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat. He can be reached at garrett.graff@gmail.com.