Welcome to Rabbit Hole, a breaking-news analysis that helps you get smart on the one story everyone’s obsessing over—for Beast Inside members only.
The most anticipated book of the year comes out tomorrow and it holds at least the promise of answering many of the questions that everyone has been trying to answer for the past three years. While the Special Counsel’s office has cleared up some issues over the course of 34 indictments and a mountain of court filings, there are still important gaps in the public record.
Were all those Russians really working for Putin? We’ve learned about a slew of Russian nationals and their acolytes popping out of the woodwork to claim that they could set up meetings between Trump and Putin. Trump lawyer Michael Cohen fielded a pitch from a Russian who offered “political synergy” with the Kremlin and the chance to set up a meeting between Trump and Putin. Joseph Mifsud, the mystery professor who told George Papadopoulos that Russia had hacked Hillary Clinton back in April 2016, showed off a fictitious Putin niece to the Trump campaign advisor and bragged that he could set up a meeting with Putin for Trump. The Agalarov family, wealthy friends of Trump who helped him put on his Miss Universe pageant in Mosocow, midwifed a meeting between senior Trump campaign officials and Natalia Veselnitskaya, a lawyer who had worked for Russian prosecutors, on the promise of dirt about Hillary Clinton, courtesy of the Russian government.
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The cast of Trump supplicants always had the air of covert Kremlin emissaries. (The intelligence community, for its part, has said with “high confidence” that it believes the online influence campaign carried out by Russian in 2016 was ordered by Putin himself.) What we don’t know is whether there were in-person outreach efforts as part of that mostly online meddling campaign. Part of the problem is the blurry line between personal business and state policy in Russia makes it hard to differentiate between personal grifting and official covert operations. Was Vesselnitskaya really conveying a promise of dirt on behalf of the Russian government or just trading on her connections to help her lobbying career? Were any of the Russians who approached the Trump campaign acting as part of the Putin-directed influence campaign or were they just hustlers bluffing?
Who first told Stone to get in touch with WikiLeaks? The special counsel’s office indictment of longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone contained some uncharacteristically elliptical language when discussing how the idea of him contacting WikiLeaks first came about. Prosecutors wrote that "a senior Trump Campaign official was directed to contact STONE about any additional releases and what other damaging information Organization 1 had regarding the Clinton Campaign." The special counsel’s office issued dozens of indictments and never seemed to have a problem obscuring identities with more direct phrasings like “Individual-1.” So who did the directing and why was the Special Counsel’s office trying so hard to hide him or her behind fuzzy language?
What’s Mueller’s theory of Manafort’s fateful meeting? When prosecutors and lawyers fopr convicted Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort were arguing about whether Manafort had lied to law enforcement after copping a plea deal, Andrew Weissmann pointed to an August 2016 meeting between alleged former Russian intelligence officer Konstantin Kilimnik and Manafort. At that meeting, Manafort, who was still serving as Trump campaign chairman, passed along internal polling data and Kilimnik pitched a peace plan for the war in Ukraine which had earned Russia so many of its sanctions designations. When Judge Amy Berman Jackson asked why the government was so focused on the meeting, Weissman said the get together goes “very much to the heart of what the special counsel’s office is investigating.” So why is that meeting so important to Mueller’s team and why didn’t it produce any further indictments?
Who’s the mystery company that fought Mueller at the Supreme Court? We still don’t know who the mystery company is that fought a subpoena from the special counsel’s office all the way to the Supreme Court. CNN first spotted the case, as well as Mueller prosecutors involvement in it, and managed to pry out of an attorney that the firm Alston Bird was representing a foreign country and the company it owned. It was important enough to the unknown country to fight the subpoena that it was willing to rack up millions in fines each day as the case wormed its way through (ultimately fruitless) appeals. A judge has already declined to unseal records that would name the company, but would the Mueller report have an answer or at least offer clues? Who’s the country? The grand jury is still at work, despite the end of the Mueller investigation. So what’s it investigating? Which countries are involved?
What did Flynn give up to catch a break? Convicted former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was one of the earliest and most high profile members of the Trump campaign to face legal jeopardy. His conversations with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak were some of the highest-level dialogue that we know of between the Trump campaign and Russian government. Flynn lied to the FBI and had criminal exposure for his unregistered lobbying on behalf of the Turkish government. But he copped a plea and hasn’t said much of anything about the case since then. Sentencing memos usually offer a window into what a cooperator like Flynn gave up, but Flynn’s sentencing has been postponed so he can participate in the trial of his former business partner, Bijan Kian, who faces lobbying charges in Virginia.
What information did Flynn have that was so good it made the special counsel’s office look the other way on going after what, at that point, was the senior-most Trump campaign official it had in its sights?
What about obstruction? The issue of whether President Trump obstructed justice in the course of the Russia investigation is the most contentious between the special counsel’s office and Attorney General William Barr. Mueller punted on whether or not the president obstructed justice and Barr filled the vacuum with his own judgment that Trump hadn’t. Mueller associated have told the Washington Post that evidence about the president potentially obstructing justice “was much more acute than Barr suggested.”
Much of what observers point to as evidence of Trump’s attempts at obstruction—his firing of James Comey, his broadsides against Jeff Sessions’ recusal, his role in crafting a misleading statement about the Trump Tower meeting—is already well known. But the statement by an anonymous special counsel associate suggests that there may be an as-yet unknown evidence about what some could interpret as attempts by Trump to stymie the investigation.
