And that President Trump's lawyers, Ty Cobb, promised to give Mueller's team advance warning if Trump was about to fire them./4
Or how their worries that Trump would fire them and his DOJ would shred the evidence they had gathered, they started stuffing everything they were learning into their search warrant applications so a copy would be in the courthouse safe, beyond Trump's reach. /5
Weissmann recounts an early shot across the bow from the WH when it somehow learned SCO had subpoenaed DeutscheBank -- for info about Manafort's $, not Trump's, though WH didn't know that -- as pushing them toward timidity in not investigating his finances./6
The book is rocks left unturned -- not just Trump's finances and not subpoenaing him for testimony, but things like not talking to Ivanka Trump, and not seeking Trump Organization emails about the negotiations over a Trump Tower Moscow project./7
Weissmann does not say whether Donald Trump Jr. received a grand jury subpoena and invoked his 5th Amendment rights to avoid testifying. But his extensive discussion of how they could have immunized him to take care of that possible problem suggests it may be what happened. /8
Weissmann blames Aaron Zebley, Mueller's deputy, for being overly cautious on such matters - Mueller often recedes in the narrative. Usually Zebley had Mueller's sanction, but on one occasion he appears to have made a commitment on his own. This is disputed, however. /9
The special counsel rules called for telling Congress if Rosenstein overruled Mueller on any investigative step. Mueller was so determined to avoid any sign of disagreement between himself and DOJ that he never directly asked to subpoena Trump and time ran out. /10
Weissmann talks about the intense pressures -- Trump's ability to fire them and dangle pardons at potential witnesses, and the withering vilification Trump & allies leveled at them. He defends himself from the angry Democrat charge./11
In an interview, I asked him about the latest insinuations re SCO phones being erased, including his own phone twice wiping because he entered the wrong passcode too many times. He said he believed their phone data was backed up by DOJ. /12
There was lots more I had no room for. With most DC books you have to plow through lots of aggregation for a few nuggets of new information & anecdotes. I found this very different. Whatever you think about the Mueller investigation, this was an unusually interesting read. /end
UPDATE: Ty Cobb denies that he promised his contact on Mueller's team that he would be a "canary in a coal mine" and give him a heads up if Trump was about to fire them.
Next in our reported-out 2025 Trump policy stakes series went up this a.m. and will be Sunday NYT front: the prospect of withdrawing the USA from or gutting NATO, abandoning Ukraine and a retreat from Europe. w/ @jonathanvswan & @maggieNYT
Gift link: nyti.ms/3uSNafa
We've been working on this series for 6 months & have been gratified lately to see others start to join in the conversation. We have been determined to stay grounded in what Trump & his truly close advisers have said & to add substantive reporting. Gift links to other chapters:/2
June 15: Trump plans to use the Justice Department as an instrument of vengeance against his adversaries, ending of the post-Watergate norm of DOJ investigative independence from the White House political control./3 nyti.ms/47RfJrQ
Seeing folks portraying it as a problem or gotcha that Garland appointed Weiss – a sitting US attorney – special counsel even though a 1999 regulation for special counsels has a provision that envisions them being appointed from outside government. Here's an explanation. /1
Takeaway up front: that part of the reg hasn't been understood to impose a controlling limit. It’s a tell that a commentator is not a credible & good-faith source of info if he doesn’t mention that Durham was *also* a sitting US attorney when Barr made him special counsel. /2
An attorney general’s legal authority to appoint someone to run a special investigation doesn’t come from the regulation. It comes from statutes enacted by Congress. Those laws don’t say that appointee has to come from outside government. /3
It occurred to me that one of the dishonest things about @marcthiessen’s column that I pointed out yesterday was actually even more egregious and is another affirmative factual error (a charitable word choice) that the WP should correct./15
When he backed his criticism of the FBI's decision to open a full investigation by misleadingly citing a passage about warrant renewal applications, Thiessen inserted "[the Trump campaign]” into a quote from the report. In context, "the target" instead meant Carter Page./16
Ironically, this comes in the same graph that falsely says the FBI presented a doctored email to the FISA court as evidence. That's wrong–it was not shown to the court–but Thiessen himself demonstrably presented a falsely doctored Durham report quote to WP readers as evidence./17
.@marcthiessen wrote a shoddy Washington Post column using as a foil the headline of my piece yesterday assessing how the Durham inquiry fell flat after years of political hype. (He didn’t engage with its substance, of course.) A dissection follows. /1 washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/…
As an initial matter, Thiessen got his start at a lobbying firm that included two named partners – Paul Manafort and Roger Stone – who were convicted of felonies in the Russia investigation & pardoned by Trump. He does not disclose that conflict to the WP’s readers. /2
Thiessen opens by insinuating that I am downplaying Durham bc I'm implicated in (his tendentious portrayal of) the media’s Trump-Russia coverage. Aside from whether he is accurately describing Mueller's complex findings, I wasn't part of the NYT’s Trump-Russia coverage team./3
In 1999, when I went to work for The Miami Herald as a cub reporter just out of college and he was its publisher, he took a mentor-like interest in me. We got to know each other over occasional dinners/drinks, a Miami Heat game, etc. /2
In late 2001 or early 2002, when I was thinking about applying for a Knight Foundation journalism fellowship at Yale Law School, he encouraged it (he has a law degree from Penn) and wrote a strong letter of recommendation that really helped me stand out from the pack. /3