May 29, 2019 · During a surprise news conference on Wednesday, Robert Mueller publicly announced he is resigning as special counsel. The resignation was to be expected. He was appointed by the Justice Department...
Aug 31, 2018 · Peter Carr, a spokesman for the special counsel, declined to explain why they left—but said that neither quit due to political allegations, bias, or any other wrongdoing.
Sep 04, 2018 · The book goes on to describe a meeting in March between Trump’s lawyer’s and Mueller in which Dowd reenacted Trump’s performance in the mock session for Mueller as a way to explain why Dowd ...
Mar 22, 2018 · Dowd, the head of President Donald Trump’s legal team fighting against special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, quit Thursday after months of speculation about a possible shake-up to ...
Jan 26, 2018 · After receiving the president’s order to fire Mr. Mueller, the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, refused to ask the Justice Department to dismiss the special counsel, saying he would quit...
John Dowd, then Raj Rajaratnam’s attorney, exits the Daniel Patrick Moynihan U.S. Courthouse in New York, on March 8, 2011. Dowd, the head of President Donald Trump’s legal team fighting against special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, quit Thursday after months of speculation about a possible shake-up to the team. Getty Images/Yana Paskova
Trump had long stated that he was eager or "happy" to be interviewed by Mueller's team, but there was reported consternation between the president and his lawyers. Dowd is said to have believed that such a meeting between Trump, known to speak off the cuff and take himself down rabbit holes, and Mueller's team was not in the president's best interests.
McGahn II, the White House counsel, believed that firing Mr. Mueller would have a catastrophic impact on the presidency and would raise more questions about whether the White House was trying to obstruct the Russia investigation.
Mueller learned about the episode in recent months as his investigators interviewed current and former senior White House officials in his inquiry into whether the president obstructed justice.
They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing a continuing investigation. Mr. McGahn disagreed with the president’s case and told senior White House officials that firing Mr. Mueller would have a catastrophic effect on Mr. Trump’s presidency. Mr.
Around the time Mr. Trump wanted to fire Mr. Mueller, the president’s legal team, led then by his longtime personal lawyer in New York, Marc E. Kasowitz, was taking an adversarial approach to the Russia investigation.
Mr. McGahn, a longtime Republican campaign finance lawyer in Washington who served on the Federal Election Commission, was the top lawyer on Mr.
But for Mr. Trump’s supporters, it reinforced the idea that, although Mr. Mueller is a Republican, he had assembled a team of Democrats to take down the president.
After receiving the president’s order to fire Mr. Mueller, the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, refused to ask the Justice Department to dismiss the special counsel, saying he would quit instead, the people said.
Mueller and his staff had low expectations for Trump’s answers; the President didn’t meet them. He said twenty-two times that he failed to “recall,” and twelve times that he had no “recollection.”. Mueller’s prosecutors did what they could at that late date: they wrote a letter.
The President has tweeted about Mueller more than three hundred times, and has repeatedly referred to the special counsel’s investigation as a “scam” and a “hoax.”. Barr and Graham agree that the Mueller investigation was illegitimate in conception and excessive in execution—in Barr’s words, “a grave injustice” that was “unprecedented in American ...
W. Bush Administration, and then, starting in 2001, the F.B.I. director for twelve years .
McCabe told Mueller that Flynn had apparently lied to the agents about his conversations with Kislyak , and said that those statements should be on Mueller’s agenda, too. There was also the issue of possible obstruction of justice once Trump became President.
These meetings demonstrate that, from the beginning, Mueller was instructed to conduct a narrow, fact-based criminal investigation.
At the meeting, Giuliani wanted to nail down a commitment from Mueller to follow a Justice Department policy, established by its Office of Legal Counsel (O.L.C.) in 1973 and reaffirmed in 2000, barring the indictment of a sitting President.
In other words, far from authorizing a wide-ranging investigation of the President and his allies, the Justice Department directed Mueller to limit his probe to individuals who were reasonably suspected of committing crimes. Temperamentally as well as professionally, Mueller was inclined to follow this advice.