The investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and the Trump campaign and its contacts with and connection to Russian officials entered a new phase yesterday with the report that special counsel Robert Mueller had convened a Grand Jury in Washington, D.C., and that his investigation was reported to be looking into areas that President Trump had previously identified as so-called “red lines” that Mueller shouldn’t cross:
WASHINGTON — Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russia’s attempts to disrupt last year’s presidential election, has issued subpoenas from a Washington-based grand jury in recent weeks, according to several lawyers involved in the case.
At least some of the subpoenas were for documents related to the business dealings of Michael T. Flynn, the retired general who briefly served as President Trump’s national security adviser. Mr. Flynn is under investigation for foreign lobbying work, as well as for conversations he had during the transition with Sergey I. Kislyak, who was Russia’s ambassador to the United States.
Mr. Mueller’s team is broadly investigating whether any Trump associates colluded with the Russian government in its attempts to disrupt the election. It is unclear whether the subpoenas issued in recent weeks relate to other members of Mr. Trump’s campaign who have been a focus of the Mueller investigation, including Paul J. Manafort, the former campaign chairman.
A grand jury based in Alexandria, Va., began issuing subpoenas in the Flynn case months ago. Mr. Mueller took over the investigation in May and assembled a team of prosecutors in an office in downtown Washington. Mr. Mueller has not impaneled a special grand jury, the lawyers involved in the case said, and has decided instead to use one of several grand juries that regularly sit in Washington.
Ty Cobb, special counsel to the president, said that he was not aware that Mr. Mueller had started using a new grand jury. “Grand jury matters are typically secret,” Mr. Cobb said. “The White House favors anything that accelerates the conclusion of his work fairly.”
He added, “The White House is committed to fully cooperating with Mr. Mueller.”
The Wall Street Journal first reported Mr. Mueller’s use of the grand jury in Washington.
Brandon Van Grack, a former Alexandria prosecutor now working for Mr. Mueller, signed the subpoenas and has been leading the investigation into Mr. Flynn. Those who described the subpoenas did so on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the case.
Meanwhile, Reuters is reporting that the Grand Jury has issued subpoenas in connection with the meeting that took place in June 2016 between Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and then campaign manager Paul Manafort and a Russian lawyer purported to have ties to the Russian Government. As has been reported, that meeting was initially sold to Trump Jr. with the idea that the lawyer would have information damaging to Hillary Clinton, but when the meeting was first revealed it was dismissed as being about the issue of adoptions of Russian children by Americans in a statement we now know the President was personally involved in drafting that initial, and completely deceptive, White House response. Perhaps more significantly, CNN is reporting that the Mueller Grand Jury is also looking into Trump’s finances:
Federal investigators exploring whether Donald Trump’s campaign colluded with Russian spies have seized on Trump and his associates’ financial ties to Russia as one of the most fertile avenues for moving their probe forward, according to people familiar with the investigation.
The web of financial ties could offer a more concrete path toward potential prosecution than the broader and murkier questions of collusion in the 2016 campaign, these sources said.
One year after the FBI opened an investigation, the probe is now managed by special counsel Robert Mueller. Sources described an investigation that has widened to focus on possible financial crimes, some unconnected to the 2016 elections, alongside the ongoing scrutiny of possible illegal coordination with Russian spy agencies and alleged attempts by President Donald Trump and others to obstruct the FBI investigation. Even investigative leads that have nothing to do with Russia but involve Trump associates are being referred to the special counsel to encourage subjects of the investigation to cooperate, according to two law enforcement sources.
The increased financial focus hasn’t gone unnoticed by Trump, who warned Mueller, via an interview with The New York Times, that his financial dealings were a red line that investigators shouldn’t cross. But the order establishing the special counsel makes clear Mueller is authorized to investigate any matters that “arose or may arise directly from the investigation.”
In response to this CNN story, the President’s attorney, Jay Sekulow, said, “President’s outside counsel has not received any requests for documentation or information about this. Any inquiry from the special counsel that goes beyond the mandate specified in the appointment we would object to.”
In 2015, the FBI began investigating cyber breaches targeting US political organizations, including the Democratic National Committee.
In the summer of 2016, US intelligence agencies noticed a spate of curious contacts between Trump campaign associates and suspected Russian intelligence, according to current and former US officials briefed on the investigation. James Comey, in his Senate testimony, said the FBI opened an investigation into Trump campaign-Russia connections in July 2016. The strands of the two investigations began to merge.
In the months that followed, investigators turned up intercepted communications appearing to show efforts by Russian operatives to coordinate with Trump associates on damaging Hillary Clinton’s election prospects, officials said. CNN has learned those communications included references to campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
In response to this CNN story, the President’s attorney, Jay Sekulow, said, “President’s outside counsel has not received any requests for documentation or information about this. Any inquiry from the special counsel that goes beyond the mandate specified in the appointment we would object to.”
In 2015, the FBI began investigating cyber breaches targeting US political organizations, including the Democratic National Committee.In the summer of 2016, US intelligence agencies noticed a spate of curious contacts between Trump campaign associates and suspected Russian intelligence, according to current and former US officials briefed on the investigation. James Comey, in his Senate testimony, said the FBI opened an investigation into Trump campaign-Russia connections in July 2016. The strands of the two investigations began to merge.
In the months that followed, investigators turned up intercepted communications appearing to show efforts by Russian operatives to coordinate with Trump associates on damaging Hillary Clinton’s election prospects, officials said. CNN has learned those communications included references to campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
A year later, the FBI is reviewing financial records related to the Trump Organization, as well as Trump, his family members, including Donald Trump Jr., and campaign associates. They’ve combed through the list of shell companies and buyers of Trump-branded real estate properties and scrutinized the roster of tenants at Trump Tower reaching back more than a half-dozen years. They’ve looked at the backgrounds of Russian business associates connected to Trump surrounding the 2013 Miss Universe pageant. CNN could not determine whether the review has included his tax returns.
n recent weeks, investigators have also started looking into the June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower and how the White House responded to news of that meeting. The session included Trump Jr., Manafort, Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, and a Russian attorney.
Trump has denied any collusion and maintains that his business empire has “no involvement with Russia” and that he has “no loans, no nothing” from Russia. His lawyers have detailed a few exceptions, including the Miss Universe pageant he held in Moscow and the Florida mansion he sold to a Russian oligarch in 2008. Trump earned more than $100 million from those deals, according to his lawyers.
“This is like any investigation,” says one person briefed on the probe. “You start at the core and then move to the periphery. You have to explore the finances. Where this is going is no different from any investigation.”
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The possible financial ties between Trump and Russia were part of the concerns for US intelligence and law enforcement officials from the beginning, according to one current law enforcement official and one former US intelligence official.
Over the decades, the Trump real estate business and its financial dealings have come under scrutiny by the FBI and the Justice Department multiple times.
In some cases, the FBI was pursuing others who did business with the Trump organization, including alleged mobsters who controlled key contractors used by many real estate developers in New York during the 1980s. The flow of Russian money in real estate — and concerns that some buyers were making the purchases to illegally launder money — had also drawn some attention by US authorities to the Trump business.
The international real estate business is a part of the global economy where foreigners can still use cash with fewer questions asked about the sources of money. Terrorism financing concerns long ago put more stringent rules on banking and other businesses. But the rules are looser in the business of buying and selling high-end real estate, US officials say.
Investigators are looking both at whether financial laws were broken and whether there are any dealings that could put the President or his associates in a compromising position.
As a preliminary matter, it ought to be noted that the convening of a Grand Jury does not mean that indictments are near or that we are anywhere near the end of the investigation. In fact, what one could really say is that this news is a strong indication that we’ve reached what could be called ‘the end of the beginning” in that Mueller and his team have likely completed the task of gathering the preliminary information they are able to obtain regarding all the relevant aspects of this story, that they’ve identified one or more central areas that they wish to focus on for now, and that they’re ready to move into a new stage of the investigation. It’s also possible that they’ve identified people who could become targets of the investigation, persons of interest who could become targets, and witnesses that would be needed for various purposes ranging from answering the ‘who, what, where, when, and how’ of the events that occurred to authenticating and identifying the documents that important to the investigation. Eventually, many if not all of these people will likely be interviewed by investigators and may be summoned to appear before the Grand Jury itself to answer questions in an effort to preserve their testimony and, in some cases, to lock them in by putting them under oath, meaning that they could potentially face perjury charges if they testify differently in another forum. For the time being, though, it appears that the main purpose of both this Washington, D.C. Grand Jury is to allow Mueller and his team to issue subpoenas to third parties. This could include anyone from business contacts to banks to people who have done business with Trump and people close to him. This part of the process is likely to take months at the very least and could include pushing back from those third parties and from Trump’s own legal team, who could seek to quash certain subpoenas in an effort to keep Mueller from opening that can of worms. Given the scope of Mueller’s mandate, though, it’s unlikely that they would be very successful in that effort.
The biggest question that these reports raise, of course, is what kind of reaction this might garner from the President himself. As previously noted, Trump has made clear that he would consider Mueller’s expanding his investigation to include Trump’s finances or the finances of his business empire to be a red line. In fact, it’s been this very prospect that has led to the not too subtle hints from Trump that he could consider trying to dismiss Mueller if he started going too far, a prospect that has been denounced by Democrats and Republicans, as has Trump’s simultaneous efforts to undermine his own Attorney General. In that regard, The Washington Post is reporting that Senators from both sides of the political aisle, including Lindsey Graham, Chris Coons, Cory Booker, and Thom Tillis, are working on legislation that would seek to protect Mueller in the event that Trump tried to remove him by requiring judicial review of any attempt to remove him. Right now, though, that legislation hasn’t even been written yet, never mind voted on, and it’s unclear just how much of a limitation Congress can place on a President trying to remove a special counsel appointed by his own Justice Department. More important, perhaps, is the fact that the empaneling of a Grand Jury makes it much harder for Trump to try to act to remove Mueller due to the fact that any such effort now is likely to be interpreted as yet another effort to obstruct justice.
So far at least, Trump has been silent about this news on his Twitter feed. Instead, his tweets so far this morning have been focused on a rally he held last night in West Virginia and this morning’s July Jobs Report. With the President headed off to New Jersey at the end of the day for an extended stay that will last three weeks due mainly to the fact that the West Wing will be undergoing extensive renovations of the HVAC system as well as other needed repairs and upgrades, though, it’s likely that he’ll have more than enough free time on his hands to find something to say about it. In the meantime, though, Trump did continue to denounce the investigation as “fake news” during his rally last night:
Donald Trump has sought to rally thousands of diehard supporters against the investigation into his campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia – on the same day news emerged that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, has convened a grand jury in the case.
“They’re trying to cheat you out of the leadership that you want with a fake story,” Trump told a rally in Huntington, West Virginia.
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The concerted effort could be a sign that the White House is realising the full gravity of the situation. Mueller, appointed special counsel in May following the dismissal of the former FBI director James Comey, has recruited more than a dozen investigators, including current and former justice department prosecutors with experience in international bribery, organised crime and financial fraud.
In what might be seen as a bid to weaponise his populist base, Trump told the crowd in Huntington, a coal country stronghold where he beat Hillary Clinton by 42 percentage points: “Most people know there were no Russians in our campaign; there never were. We didn’t win because of Russia. We won because of you.”
The crowd, many with “Make America great again” hats or signs, erupted in vociferous cheers. Trump continued: “We won because we totally outworked the other side. We won because of millions of patriotic Americans voted to take back their country.”
The president asked mockingly: “Have you seen any Russians in West Virginia or Ohio or Pennsylvania? Are there any Russians here tonight, any Russians? They can’t beat us at the voting booths so they’re trying to cheat you out of the future and the future that you want. They’re trying to cheat you out of the leadership that you want with a fake story that is demeaning to all of us and most importantly demeaning to our country and demeaning to our constitution.”
This will likely be the position that Trump, his supporters in the media ranging from Fox News and Breitbart to conservatives online who still seem fine with making common cause with this President in the days or weeks to come. Despite this push back, though, Mueller seems intent on moving forward with his investigation undaunted. Where it heads from here is anyone’s guess.
