Mueller Investigation 2019: Indictments, Witnesses, and More
Credit to Author: Garrett M. Graff| Date: Tue, 08 Jan 2019 12:00:00 +0000
Last Friday, just like Punxsutawney Phil, DC District Court judge Beryl Howell emerged from her chambers, saw her shadow, and announced six more months of Bob Mueller. Judge Howell’s extension of Mueller’s grand jury, which was set to expire over the weekend, was widely expected—the special counsel’s office has made clear in recent weeks that it has plenty of unfinished business—but the extension underscores just how much work is still left in Mueller’s probe.
In fact, surveying the 2019 landscape anew after a flurry of near-daily investigation revelations in the month following Thanksgiving makes clear that Mueller’s investigation has a packed agenda still ahead (not to mention a final report to write). Here are some of the loose threads and unanswered questions that seem most likely to be topping Mueller’s to-do list as January begins:
One of the most intriguing pieces of unfinished business from Mueller’s Thanksgiving flurry was the aborted plea agreement with conspiracy theorist and would-be Wikileaks intermediary Jerome Corsi. Mueller clearly believes that Corsi lied to investigators about his knowledge or role in Wikileaks’ publishing of emails and documents stolen from Democratic officials by Russian hackers. Yet despite all the activity around Corsi, some intriguing movement about Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s years-long asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and news about charges Assange may face in the US, the Corsi thread went cold in December.
Just before the holidays, the Daily Beast reported that Mueller is moving toward making public one of his most-investigated-yet-least-seen inquiries: The impact of Middle Eastern influence in the 2016 campaign, focused around would-be power broker George Nader and Blackwater mercenary group founder Erik Prince (brother of Education secretary Betsy DeVos). Prince, who is apparently cooperating with Mueller, told CNBC Monday that he’d rather receive a “proctology exam” than be questioned by the special counsel’s team.
One of the surprises buried in Mueller’s December court filings documenting Paul Manafort’s ongoing obfuscations was that Manafort twice testified before Mueller’s grand jury. That’s potentially deeply significant precisely because we know that Mueller thinks Manafort was lying repeatedly. The fact that they put him before a grand jury means that on whatever subject he was testifying, there’s ample and important documentary evidence to back up (and box in) any grand jury testimony. We have yet to see what fruits that case may bear.
The onetime national security adviser’s aborted sentencing in December was one of the month’s oddest turns, as a furious judge encouraged Flynn to keep cooperating rather than face what appeared likely to be jail time. Judge Emmet Sullivan blasted Flynn: “Arguably, you sold your country out.” Sullivan got to read more than was publicly released both about Flynn’s cooperation and his crimes—and was clearly troubled by what he learned regarding Flynn’s behavior. Is there more troubling information to come about Flynn that’s relevant to one of the other investigations where he’s cooperating?
There are complicated geopolitical machinations underway in the case of NRA hanger-on and Russian agent Maria Butina, who pleaded guilty in December to charges known as “espionage lite” and promised to cooperate with investigators as they trace her 2016 election contacts. Now, Russia has detained an American, an unlikely espionage agent, in what appears to be an effort to jumpstart a prisoner exchange—an exchange perhaps meant to cut short that very cooperation. Court papers have already pointed the finger at Russian banker-slash-handler Alexander Torshin. Is he next in the government’s crosshairs? The Butina case has always been one of the oddest threads of the Russia investigation. It could be entirely unrelated, or it could be deeply central.
Mueller’s court filings have laid out that the special counsel believes that Kilimnik, Paul Manafort’s business partner and codefendant, had ties to Russian intelligence in 2016. Yet we haven’t seen evidence of why Mueller believes that—and, more important, what relevance that has to the Trump campaign.
This week’s Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives is likely to begin a flood of documents from Capitol Hill to Mueller’s team. When Michael Cohen was charged by Mueller with lying to Congress, it opened a new investigative angle—and new House Intelligence chair Adam Schiff made clear that he thinks there are other aides who lied before his committee—paging Donald Trump Jr.—and that he plans to turn over evidence and those transcripts to Mueller as he takes over the committee from Republican Devin Nunes.
Over the course of 2018, we saw significant movement across all four major areas of Mueller’s probe into Russia’s role in the 2016 election—indictments around past Russian business deals and money laundering; indictments of the Internet Research Agency for its information-influence operations on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites (a case that continues to play in colorful ways); indictments of Russian military intelligence officers for the theft and publication of Democratic emails and an attack on state-level voting systems; and then indictments of Trump campaign officials for lying about their contacts with Russian officials.
There’s only one area of Mueller’s probe where we never saw movement publicly in 2018: The big kahuna question of obstruction—did President Trump pervert justice by firing FBI director James Comey or through any other actions, like his breezy, nothing-to-see statement from Air Force One about the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower? Yet there were intriguing breadcrumbs in December about what Mueller is interested in obstruction-wise: Again in the Manafort court filings, Mueller points out that Manafort lied about having contact with the Trump administration in 2018. Who was he in contact with—and why? There’s virtually no legitimate, innocent reason for Manafort—who was already under indictment at the time—to be in contact with the White House through the spring of 2018.
Beyond the lengthy list of loose threads of Mueller’s probe, it’s worth remembering too that the special counsel is hardly the only intrepid investigator that President Trump and his associated businesses face in 2019—even before the House of Representatives restarts the long hibernating oversight process on Capitol Hill. Buried amid the New Year's revelry was news that the New Jersey attorney general and the FBI are looking into immigration violations at President Trump’s New Jersey golf course. Along with the 17 investigations outlined last month, that would mean that Trump faces at least 18 distinct investigations, ranging from Mueller’s to the New York attorney general’s.
As we look at Mueller’s to-do list, though, there’s at least one person beyond the President himself—who continues to decry the “witch hunt”—who should be very annoyed at Robert Mueller’s decisions thus far: Roger Griswold. The Connecticut congressman introduced the Logan Act, the law prohibiting citizens from conducting foreign policy, in 1798. Now that Flynn’s case has wrapped up, it appears that Griswold’s primary legal legacy might never be used.
The Logan Act has never been enforced in America’s history, yet it’d be hard to find a case more clear than the circumstances surrounding Flynn’s guilty plea: his telephone calls in December 2016 to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, telling the Russians, apparently, not to worry about the Obama administration’s sanctions because Trump would unwind them.
If Flynn—a private citizen at the time—calling the Russian ambassador to tell Russia to look past a foreign policy action by the White House doesn’t constitute a case worthy of a Logan Act prosecution, it’s hard to see what else might down the road. Legal (and political) precedent, after all, is made through prosecutorial discretion—what’s chosen to be prosecuted and what’s not—and any future Logan Act prosecution will likely be undermined by defense lawyers pointing to the set of facts around Flynn’s calls and saying “How come prosecutors chose to charge our client and not Mike Flynn?”
The decisions in such cases have downstream impacts as well. James Comey and the FBI have talked about how their decision to rule that Hillary Clinton didn’t commit a crime amid her email scandal was influenced by the previous prosecution of CIA director David Petreaus for leaking classified information to a biographer. By drawing circles around Flynn’s action—saying his lies about it were a crime but not prosecuting the underlying telephone conversations with a foreign adversary—Robert Mueller, intentionally or not, could set in motion a new foreign policy norm.
Mueller is following his tradition and instinct as a conservative prosecutor, charging the most clear crimes while leaving more exotic ones to the side, but his inaction here will influence a generation of public corruption prosecutors. When all is said and done, it’ll be worth asking Mueller and his team: Why didn’t they prosecute a Logan Act violation?
Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg) is a contributing editor for WIRED and the co-author 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.