Where Law Ends — Blinkist Library

What’s in it for me? Get an insider’s account of what it was like to be part of the Mueller investigation.

Chances are that you’ve heard of the Mueller investigation and the report that emerged from it.

But many people are likely to have gotten the wrong impression about what was discovered during that investigation due to the way the report was initially presented to the public.

This wasn’t accidental.

As you’ll discover, burying the facts and findings of the 22-month investigation was intentional.

Andrew Weissmann was one of the lead investigators working alongside Robert Mueller, and he wants to set the record straight and make more people aware of what they uncovered.

This includes letting the people know that the investigation didn’t absolve President Trump of anything.

In these blinks, you’ll learn how much Paul Manafort spent on gardening and clothing; how the government failed to prepare for the 2020 election; and how Attorney General William Barr misrepresented the Mueller report.

Andrew Weissmann had already had a storied career before working for the Special Counsel.

Andrew Weissmann’s path to the Special Counsel’s Office was a long journey that involved a stint as a federal prosecutor with the Eastern District of New York (EDNY) and 20 years working at the Department of Justice.

During his time as an EDNY prosecutor in the 1990s, he’d handled cases involving the city’s notorious crime families.

This included the prosecution of Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, of the Genovese crime family, and John Gotti, the head of the Gambino family.

Weissmann then moved on to another landmark case by being part of the Enron Task Force, which brought to light one of the most egregious cases of corporate fraud in US history.

Little did he know at the time that these cases would serve as good training for what was to come his way in 2017.

The key message here is: Andrew Weissmann had already had a storied career before working for the Special Counsel.

After the success of the Enron Task Force, Weissmann moved on to the FBI, where he first met Robert Mueller, who was then the bureau’s director.

By that point, Mueller was already well-known to Weissmann as no-nonsense, coolly analytical, and a keen listener.

But Mueller could also make you laugh.

When Weissmann first sat down in his office, Mueller looked at his resume and groaned.

Here was another “un-supervisable prosecutor from the Eastern District of New York.

” But this was soon followed by a laugh.

It turned out that Mueller had a fondness for tenacious EDNY prosecutors.

During his time at the FBI, Weissmann’s admiration for Mueller increased.

In the time following the 9/11 attacks, Weissmann saw Mueller digest daily intelligence briefings day after day, combing through enormous amounts of data, methodically assessing threats to the nation’s security.

At the same time, Mueller was always pushing the bureau to do a better job – and leading by example.

In 2013, Weissmann left the FBI to head the fraud section of the Department of Justice.

Mueller also left the FBI that year – but the two were reunited a week after Mueller accepted the job of leading the Special Counsel appointed to investigate matters surrounding the 2016 presidential election.

Weissmann led Team M, one of three Special Counsel teams.

The call from the Special Counsel’s Office came in late May 2017.

Weissmann sat down for a meeting with Mueller and two colleagues who were already on the team.

Jim Quarles had worked on the Watergate case that had brought down Richard Nixon in the 1970s.

Aaron Zebley, who Weissmann had worked with at the FBI, was always eager to weigh all the options and find a compromise, making him a counterweight to Mueller’s more decisive temperament.

During that meeting, Weissmann learned what the parameters of the Special Counsel were, and how the teams were set up.

He didn’t have to spend too much time deliberating; he quickly decided to say yes to joining the team.

Here’s the key message: Weissmann led Team M, one of three Special Counsel teams.

The Special Counsel’s Office had several tasks.

It investigated Russian interference in the 2016 US election to determine whether the Russians had worked in coordination with the Trump campaign.

It also sought to discover whether there’d been any obstruction of justice surrounding the firing of FBI director James Comey and the FBI investigation of General Michael Flynn.

To get the job done, Mueller set up three teams.

Team R would focus on anything related to Russia.

Team 600 would look at obstructions of justice.

And Team M would focus on Paul Manafort.

He was of particular interest because he’d not only served for a time as Trump’s campaign chairman, but he also had extensive financial and political dealings with Russia and Ukraine.

With Weissmann’s background in fraud investigations, he was Mueller’s choice to lead Team M.

No time was wasted.

By June 5, 2017, Weissmann was moving into a new office and getting to work familiarizing himself with Manafort.

As it turned out, Manafort was already on the radar for some shady financial activities and political lobbying he’d been doing in the US and Ukraine, some of which were on behalf of Russian interests.

A total of four federal investigations were already underway.

Focusing on Manafort had been a hunch on Mueller’s part – and it was clear his instincts were still sharp.

Generally speaking, Manafort was well-known as a consultant and lobbyist for some of the most notorious dictators and oligarchs the world had to offer.

He’d made himself a fortune and financed quite a garish lifestyle by cooperating with corrupt governments in places like Angola and the Philippines, as well as Russia and Ukraine.

Ongoing investigations into Manafort’s past quickly helped build the case against him.

Quickly, Weissmann was getting a good idea of who Paul Manafort was.

He was the kind of guy who spent $100,000 a year just on the gardening bill for his Hamptons estate.

His clothing budget was in the millions, and his wardrobe included a $15,000 ostrich-leather jacket.

He was the kind of guy whose own daughter said that he had “no moral or legal compass” and that his wealth was “blood money.

” Where was this money coming from?

According to the FBI investigators Weissmann spoke to, two of Manafort’s main benefactors in recent years were suspected to be Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch who coordinated his activities with the Kremlin, and Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovych’s political party.

The key message is this: Ongoing investigations into Manafort’s past quickly helped build the case against him.

Yanukovych was a dubious politician.

In 2004, his rival for the Ukraine presidency was mysteriously poisoned and disfigured.

Yanukovych went on to win the initial vote, only to be disqualified for corrupt electoral practices.

In 2010, Yanukovych ran again, this time with Manafort on board as his campaign manager.

He won.

And after the election, Yanukovych had his opponent, a woman named Yulia Tymoshenko, thrown in jail.

Weissmann saw an eerie parallel with the frequent use of the chant “Lock her up” against Hillary Clinton during Trump’s rallies in 2016.

Between 2010 and 2014, Manafort had unlimited access to Yanukovych and Ukraine’s government agencies.

He had a full staff to help him carry out clandestine work.

His closest assistant during this time was a Russian, Konstantin Kilimnik – or KK, as he was often called.

Yanukovych’s autocratic regime came crashing down in 2014 when protests and riots sent the Ukrainian president fleeing to Russia.

This certainly raised some questions as to what lines Manafort was willing to cross.

But the really helpful information came from a Department of Justice investigation that Weissmann would officially take over from the Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section (or MLARS) of the department’s criminal division.

Investigators at MLARS had been looking into Manafort’s questionable foreign bank accounts and offshore companies for years.

It appeared quite possible that he’d been using these accounts and companies to launder money and avoid US tax laws.

It’s not illegal to have offshore bank accounts – but if Manafort was using those accounts to spend income that wasn’t being noted in his US tax declarations, that most certainly was illegal.

The case against Manafort became stronger when his illegal lobbying activities were discovered.

One of the other ongoing Manafort investigations that was incorporated into the Special Counsel’s case came from the FARA Unit of the Department of Justice.

FARA refers to the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

To put it simply, it’s illegal for people to lobby the US government on behalf of foreign interests without first registering those activities with the Department of Justice.

But the FARA Unit is understaffed, and so this law is seldom enforced.

First, it has to be proven that the foreign lobbyist was aware of the FARA laws and knowingly defied them.

More often than not, offenders register once they’re confronted, and no charges are filed.

But in Manafort’s case, the evidence of his illegal activity was indisputable.

The key message here is: The case against Manafort became stronger when his illegal lobbying activities were discovered.

Between 2012 and 2014, while working for President Yanukovych, Manafort had lobbied extensively in the US to paint a more positive image of Ukraine’s corrupt, autocratic ruler.

Many Western nations were publicly opposed to the way Yanukovych had imprisoned his political rival, and Manafort enlisted both a Republican- and a Democrat-affiliated lobbying firm to try to change their perceptions.

The problem was, neither he nor the two firms had registered with FARA.

This issue became public in 2016 when Manafort joined the Trump campaign, and at that time the two firms registered retroactively – but Manafort didn’t.

Instead, through a lawyer, he stated that he didn’t have any records from this period, so he was unable to respond to the FARA Unit’s requests.

Oddly enough, by the time Weissmann learned of this investigation, the FARA Unit still hadn’t contested Manafort’s statement.

When the Special Counsel’s Office obtained a search warrant for Manafort’s Virginia condo, they were hoping that they’d find proof of his illegal lobbying and be able to use that to convince him to cooperate with them.

And sure enough, they found plenty of evidence relating to his lobbying efforts on behalf of Ukraine, contradicting his statements to federal officers.

Also uncovered was extensive correspondence detailing his work with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska and containing references to “briefing the Putin government” about Manafort’s efforts to make Ukraine, Montenegro, and various African countries more friendly to Deripaska’s business dealings.

Evidence of obstruction came in the form of a draft letter announcing Comey’s firing.

While the case against Manafort was moving along quickly, strides were also being made on Team 600.

This was the team dealing with the issue of obstruction as it pertained to the firing of James Comey and FBI investigations surrounding Michael Flynn and Russian election interference.

Flynn, who’d been the administration’s national security advisor, had been caught lying to the FBI about the nature of a recorded phone conversation he’d had with the Russian ambassador to the US.

But what Team 600 was interested in was whether Trump had tried to interfere with the FBI investigation into Flynn, as well as the ongoing investigation into election interference.

Team 600 had received copies of notes in which Comey had recorded that Trump asked for leniency in the matter of Flynn – and also asked for Comey’s “loyalty.

” While these notes were compelling, they weren’t as strong as another early piece of evidence.

This is the key message: Evidence of obstruction came in the form of a draft letter announcing Comey’s firing.

In June 2017, Team 600 received a document that Jim Quarles called “tinfoil helmet material,” referring to the type of headwear that a mentally unstable person might wear in order to block communications from extraterrestrials.

The document was an early draft of the letter justifying Comey’s firing as FBI director.

The official letter recommending that Comey be fired came from Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general.

Rosenstein cited Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation as the reason he was fired, along with a desire to restore the public’s confidence in the FBI.

While this reasoning was dubious, it was plausible enough.

Many people, including Weissmann, believed Comey had overstepped his bounds with his press conferences and statements on Clinton’s emails leading up to the 2016 election.

Nevertheless, there remained an obvious question regarding whether President Trump had in fact fired Comey for more personal reasons.

And now the Special Counsel’s Office had a copy of an early draft letter pertaining to the Comey firing – this one written by Trump and Stephen Miller, one of his advisors.

In the letter, Trump claimed that Comey had opened the investigation into Russian interference while assuring Trump on multiple occasions that the president himself wasn’t under investigation.

The Special Counsel realized that Trump’s letter had been written shortly after a press conference at which Comey had been asked whether Trump was personally under investigation – and had refused to give an answer.

In late 2017, Team R made a remarkable discovery.

In the months that followed the discovery of the draft letter regarding Comey’s firing, interviews with White House staff only served to confirm the suspicions of Team 600.

Multiple people explained that Trump had made up his mind about Comey long before Rod Rosenstein’s recommendation that the FBI director be fired.

In fact, Trump even went on national television to say that “regardless of [Rosenstein’s] recommendation, I was going to fire Comey.

” The reality is that, technically speaking, the president doesn’t need a reason to fire the director of the FBI.

But that doesn’t mean that Trump didn’t also obstruct justice in this instance.

Meanwhile, at the Special Counsel’s Office, Team R was also hard at work on its investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, and whether the Trump campaign played any role in it.

The key message here is: In late 2017, Team R made a remarkable discovery.

Thanks to the work by Team R, especially lead investigator Jeannie Rhee, there was no doubt that Russia launched a significant and unprecedented attack on democracy in the lead-up to the 2016 US election.

Team R knew that the National Security Division had already concluded that a branch of the Russian military known as the GRU was behind the recent Democratic National Committee server hack, but it was astonished to find out that nothing was really being done to prevent future attacks.

As Rhee said, “The rest is going to be up to us.

” The full extent of Russian involvement in the election was only made clear in August 2017, when lawyers from Facebook visited the Special Counsel’s Office and delivered a wealth of new information.

They’d found a large number of social media accounts based in Russia with the specific agenda of sowing disinformation and stoking political divisions within the United States.

Team R spent the winter of 2017 digging into this information and made a startling discovery: these accounts came from a Russian organization, funded by Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, known as the Internet Research Agency, or IRA.

People at IRA worked day and night posting on social media, organizing demonstrations, and interacting with unwitting Americans, all in an effort to get Donald Trump elected.

Not only did they interact with average voters, but people like Donald Trump Jr.

, Eric Trump, Sean Hannity of Fox News, and Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway all forwarded or responded to social media posts made by IRA accounts.

One of the early pieces of evidence for Team R was the infamous meeting at Trump Tower.

Despite the fact that Donald Trump continues to deny Russian election interference, it happened – and it continues to happen today.

Months after the Special Counsel’s report, a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation, coming from a Republican-led Senate, concluded that the Internet Research Agency had operated “at the direction of the Kremlin” to support Donald Trump and harm Hillary Clinton.

Regardless, Trump prefers to shake hands with Putin and take his word that Russia wasn’t involved.

But what is perhaps most troubling is that there has yet to be a team or task force assigned to neutralize this threat.

The message from the Trump administration seems to be, “If it’s helping Trump, why would we try to stop it?

” This brings us to the question of whether or not there’s direct evidence of the Trump administration working in coordination with Russia and its efforts at election interference.

Here’s the key message: One of the early pieces of evidence for Team R was the infamous meeting at Trump Tower.

It’s now an undisputed fact that people from the Trump campaign, including Donald Jr.

, Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner, met with Russian operatives, including a lawyer named Natalya Veselnitskaya, at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016.

What was discussed at this meeting has been harder to pin down.

At first, Don Jr.

claimed that he’d never set up or attended any meetings with Russians as part of his 2016 campaign duties.

But when news of the Trump Tower meeting became public, he changed his tune and said that it was a meeting at which they “primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children.

” What this statement doesn’t reveal is that adoption of Russian children by American parents was just one of the programs that had ended as a result of the Obama administration’s sanctions against Russia.

Natalya Veselnitskaya was well-known as a vocal critic of those sanctions.

When further pressed about the details of the meeting, Don Jr.

made the surprising decision to post his emails related to it on social media.

This revealed that the impetus to meet had come from an offer from Russian operatives to supply the Trump campaign with supposedly incriminating information about Hillary Clinton.

However, further evidence, including text messages sent by Kushner at the time, suggest that such information wasn’t immediately forthcoming.

Kushner appeared to be bored and disappointed by the meeting.

But the agreement to meet at all sent another message: the Trump campaign was open to Russian assistance.

In many ways, Team R and Team 600 were entering untested legal waters.

If there was an exchange of information between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives at the Trump Tower meeting, would that have been illegal?

The answer isn’t straightforward.

It’s illegal for political candidates to solicit foreigners for anything of value.

This law is explicitly intended to keep foreign influence out of US elections.

For the same reason, according to campaign finance laws, it’s illegal to accept a contribution or donation of money or “other thing of value” from a foreign entity.

Now, let’s say that the compromising information the Russians claimed to have was personal emails from Hillary Clinton, stolen when Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta clicked on a link in an email sent to him by a Russian hacker.

Would those emails count as something of value?

This is the key message: In many ways, Team R and Team 600 were entering untested legal waters.

As with many issues in this investigation, there was no precedent here in which a decision had been made on whether or not information on an opponent qualified as a “thing of value.

” But Weissmann and other lawyers in the Special Counsel’s Office believed that such information certainly would qualify.

But that wasn’t the only hurdle they’d have to clear in order to charge Trump campaign personnel with a crime.

They’d also have to prove that people like Don Jr.

and Kushner knew that soliciting and accepting things of value from foreigners was against the law.

Certainly, in their comments regarding the meeting, no one seems to have recognized its illegal nature.

And since neither Kushner nor Don Jr.

had any real political experience, it’s plausible that they were relying on Manafort to raise a concern if there were a problem.

What is illegal and perhaps more troubling is the statement Donald Trump made on live television in July 2016, less than a week after WikiLeaks released emails and information that had been stolen by Russian hackers.

Trump said, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand emails that are missing.

” This was in reference to Hillary Clinton’s emails relating to the FBI investigation that had been closed earlier that month.

Trump claims that he was joking.

But during its investigation, Team R found that immediately following Trump’s statement, the GRU hackers responsible for the DNC server breach began a new attack on Clinton’s private email accounts.

Indictments led to convictions, but the threat of a presidential pardon loomed large.

While Team R prepared to issue indictments against the Russian agents responsible for election interference, Weissmann was moving forward with the case against Manafort.

On October 27, 2017, he was indicted on 12 criminal charges, including money laundering, tax evasion, failure to register as a foreign lobbyist, and lying to federal officials.

Amazingly, while he was out on bail, awaiting trial, the crimes didn’t stop.

He was also under a gag order not to talk about his case.

Yet he repeatedly kept up correspondence with Fox News host Sean Hannity, feeding him talking points for his daily television show.

But, eventually, Manafort did have his day in court – and was sentenced to a total of seven and a half years in prison.

The key message here is: Indictments led to convictions, but the threat of a presidential pardon loomed large.

Along with Manafort, two other people were indicted at the same time.

His long-time associate and Trump’s deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates was also indicted, as was George Papadopoulos, Trump’s campaign advisor.

Gates was often the go-between for Manafort and his Russian and Ukrainian contacts, and he did help shed some light on matters that Manafort proved unwilling to discuss honestly.

For instance, Gates revealed that, under Manafort’s direction, he’d repeatedly shared the campaign’s voter data with Konstantin Kilimnik.

Why details about American voters were being shared with a Russian operative was an alarming question.

Ultimately, however, Gates’s cooperation with the investigation was limited, as he was torn between being honest and being loyal to Manafort.

There was another reason why many people like Manafort and Gates proved reluctant to cooperate with the Special Counsel, despite facing significant jail time for their crimes.

In another unprecedented development, President Trump was wielding the power of the presidential pardon as a gift to those who remained loyal to him in the face of federal investigators.

This was yet another act by Trump that blurred the line between exercising his executive powers and obstructing justice.

Just like his ability to fire the director of the FBI, the president’s ability to pardon criminals is a power that has been limited only by the perceived norms and traditions of the role.

No one ever expected a president would use these privileges in the way Trump has.

This raises another question about how much authority the American legal system has over a sitting president.

Ultimately, the Special Counsel ran up against limits both real and self-imposed.

In the US, is it possible to indict a sitting president?

This was a question that lingered throughout the investigation and continued to weigh on Weissmann’s mind long after the investigation had wrapped.

Currently, there are two decisions by the Office of Legal Counsel, part of the Department of Justice, that state that a sitting president cannot be indicted for a crime.

It’s worth noting that one of these decisions came during the Nixon administration and the other during the Clinton administration.

Since the Special Counsel’s investigation was under the purview of the Department of Justice, Mueller felt obligated to follow those decisions.

But the truth is, those decisions have never been challenged – and there’s certainly never been a case like the Russian interference case before.

So it’s entirely possible that the decisions regarding indictment of a sitting president could be overruled in court.

This is the key message: Ultimately, the Special Counsel ran up against limits both real and self-imposed.

The author has a great deal of respect and fondness for Robert Mueller, but he questioned his reasoning when it came to Mueller’s decision not to compel the president to answer questions, and how Mueller decided to present the Special Counsel’s final report.

Mueller’s team may have been duty-bound not to indict the president, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t have subpoenaed him as a way to get some answers to its questions.

Complicating things, of course, was the fact that there was a constant threat of the president firing Mueller, or otherwise using his powers to further limit the investigation.

Indeed, according to White House Counsel Don McGahn, who sat for multiple interviews with Team 600, McGahn was forced to refuse multiple demands that he fire Mueller for no other reason than Trump’s personal agenda.

This constant threat forced members of the team – most significantly Aaron Zebley – to look constantly for ways to avoid rattling the president’s cage.

So the decision was made not to force Trump to answer questions regarding the Trump Tower meeting, the Comey firing, and other possible incidents of obstruction.

Mueller also decided that, since Trump couldn’t be indicted while in office, and therefore wouldn’t have the chance to defend himself against criminal charges until after he left the White House, the Special Counsel’s report would neither recommend criminal charges nor exonerate the president.

The Special Counsel’s report was deliberately misinterpreted, revealing the need for changes in the system.

The Special Counsel’s report was submitted on March 2, 2019.

A series of conclusions and findings were also written up as a summary of the full report, which ran to over 400 pages.

The question that the press and the public were waiting to have answered, of course, was one that the report didn’t fully address: Did the president obstruct justice or cooperate with Russian election interference?

Weissmann believes that the report’s findings make it clear that the investigation found plenty of evidence to suggest, at the very least, instances of obstruction.

In no way does the report exonerate the president.

But thanks to the attorney general, that wasn’t the message the public heard.

Here’s the key message: The Special Counsel’s report was deliberately misinterpreted, revealing the need for changes in the system.

Weissmann was looking forward to the day the report’s findings would be revealed to the public.

When that day finally came, on March 24, 2019, he was traveling from New York to Washington, DC, when he heard on the radio that Attorney General William Barr was going to make an announcement.

What Weissmann heard that morning was not what the Special Counsel’s report stated.

Instead, Barr’s statement said that the report had concluded that there was no evidence of collusion with Russia.

Barr explained that the Special Counsel had left the decision regarding obstruction up to the determination of the attorney general, and that Barr and the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, had concluded that there’d been no obstruction.

In other words, Barr suggested that the report had cleared Trump of any wrongdoing.

The truth was that in no way had the Special Counsel’s Office left any findings up to the determination of the attorney general.

After all, the whole point of establishing the Special Counsel was so that findings could be reached independently.

This reveals a very important flaw in the system.

As it stands, the president can surround himself with individuals he’s personally appointed, particularly in the Department of Justice.

Thus, when former attorney general Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation, Trump was able to fire him and install a new attorney general who would follow the president’s orders.

This was especially devastating to Mueller since Barr had been a longtime personal friend of his.

The unprecedented nature of Trump’s presidency should expose the fact that the United States needs a better system of checks and balances in place.

Hopefully, when the chance presents itself, America will emerge with better guardrails to prevent further abuses of power.

The key message in these blinks: Andrew Weissmann led Team M, one of three teams in the Special Counsel’s Office created to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 US general election, and to determine whether the Trump administration had cooperated with the Russians.

Final summary

The Counsel’s other task was to find out whether there’d been any instances of obstruction of justice related to the firing of FBI director James Comey.

In the end, the investigation resulted in three convictions and several indictments against foreign agents.

But the investigation may have taken a wrong turn in failing to force the president to answer some important questions, and in failing to make firm findings and recommendations about the evidence they uncovered around criminal wrongdoing.

Got feedback?

We’d love to hear what you think about our content!

Just drop an email to remember@blinkist.

com with Where Law Ends as the subject line and share your thoughts!