Charlie Savage Profile picture
Aug 24, 2022 17 tweets 6 min read Read on X
BREAKING: DOJ has released the full memo to then Attorney General Bill Barr analyzing why Trump should not be charged with obstruction-of-justice based on the Mueller report. DOJ had fought but lost a @CREWcrew FOIA lawsuit seeking this disclosure. int.nyt.com/data/documentt…
2/ Vol II of the Mueller report detailed numerous episode raising potential obstruction of justice concerns. Barr purported to clear Trump of all of them, but never publicly discussed many of them. Here are some of the most important ones from the report: nytimes.com/2019/04/23/us/…
/3 An overarching premise is that Mueller did not find evidence sufficient to charge Trump with conspiring with Russia, so there was no underlying crime. (It does not raise the possibility that Mueller failed to get that evidence because his investigation was obstructed.)
4/ The Mueller report strongly suggested that the Mueller team thought Trump dangling a pardon at Manafort to induce him not to cooperate with their investigation met the necessary elements of obstruction.
5/ The Barr memo -- which reads like a defense lawyer's brief -- never mentions pardon dangling and characterizes Trump as merely praising or condemning witnesses based on whether they cooperated with investigators.
6/ The memo argues for interpreting this as Trump not wanting Manafort etc to make up false evidence against him. It again bolsters that by characterizing Mueller's failure to obtain sufficient evidence to charge any conspiracy with Russia as meaning there was none.
7/ Another significant episode was Trump pressuring McGahn to publicly lie and write a memo for the file falsely denying that Trump had pushed him to fire Mueller, both of which McGahn refused to do.
8/ The memo characterizes McGahn's memory of this episode as "ambiguous" and since Trump denied it, says it could not be proved beyond a reasonable doubt.
9/ When McGahn testified under oath about that episode before Congress in 2017, he backed the Mueller report's account as accurate.
10/ It also argues it wasn't obstruction when Trump tried to get McGahn to write a memo denying the attempted firing bc McGahn had already told Mueller about it. It doesn't address that a memo contradicting his testimony would undermine his ability to be a witness in any trial.
11/ As for the attempted firing of Mueller itself....
12/ The memo stresses that Trump's aides refused to carry out his orders. While it acknowledges that an unsuccessful attempt to commit a crime is still a criminal act, it argues that since Trump backed down prosecutors could not prove his intent beyond a reasonable doubt.
13/ The memo uses the same rationale to dispose of Trump's unsuccessful attempts to get aides to curtail or gut the Russia investigation, which it conflated with his unsuccessful attempt to have Mueller fired.
14/ As for urging Comey to go easy on Flynn and firing Comey, the memo argues there are explanations for both (e.g., frustration that Comey wouldn't say publicly what he was saying privately) that do not rise to obstruction. The Mueller report also characterized those as murkier.
15/ The memo ends, first, by arguing that "the most compelling interpretation" of Trump's conduct was that he reasonably believe that Mueller's investigation was interfering with his governing agenda.
16/ As a kind of PS, it argues against interpreting obstruction laws as applying to officials with supervisory authority over investigations, which echoes a memo that private citizen Barr wrote for Trump's team in 2018 before he became attorney general. int.nyt.com/data/documenth…
Some of this analysis has now been incorporated into this conventional news story: nytimes.com/2022/08/24/us/…

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More from @charlie_savage

Dec 9, 2023
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
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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
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Read 18 tweets
Aug 12, 2023
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 Image
Read 15 tweets
May 19, 2023
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 ImageImage
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 Image
Read 5 tweets
May 18, 2023
.@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 Image
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 Image
Read 14 tweets
Apr 27, 2023
DOJ detention memo for Jack Teixeira storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco… /1
DOJ says he smashed his electronics /2 Image
DOJ says he was suspended from high school for talking about violence and making racial threats /3 Image
Read 9 tweets
Mar 26, 2023
As Alberto @Ibarguen -- the head of the Knight Foundation @knightfdn and former publisher of The @MiamiHerald -- retires, I would like to add a public note of personal appreciation to the encomiums. /1 philanthropy.com/article/knight…
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
Read 5 tweets

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