One of special counsel Robert Mueller’s top prosecutors led the initiative to draft a three-count obstruction of justice indictment against President Trump, according to author Michael Wolff.
Siege: Trump Under Fire, which hit bookshelves Tuesday, says Andrew Weissmann, who was widely regarded as Mueller’s “pit bull,” was in charge of the effort.
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Last month the Guardian first reported the draft indictment, without mentioning who was behind it, and said staff had viewed the documents. Mueller’s office quickly pushed back against the claim. “The documents that you’ve described do not exist,” Mueller spokesman Peter Carr said in a statement to the Washington Examiner.
Weissmann led the federal inquiry’s case against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was sentenced to roughly seven and a half years in prison for conspiracy and fraud. He came under fire by conservatives for actions that show the potential for bias, including attending Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election night party and praising former acting Attorney General Sally Yates in an email after she refused to defend his initial travel ban. Weissmann was also one of the Justice Department officials who was informed of British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s anti-Trump dossier by former DOJ official Bruce Ohr before joining Mueller’s team.
In the book, Weissmann is introduced as a fierce counterweight to Trump. He was chief of the criminal fraud division at the Justice Department when Mueller recruited him in May 2017, and Wolff plays up his reputation. “Many believed Weissmann was the most aggressive white-collar prosecutor in the nation,” Wolff wrote.
The book says Trump “thought he knew all about Weissmann” and deemed him a “screw-up and a loser” over his prosecution of accounting firm Arthur Andersen as part of the Enron task force, which was overturned by the Supreme Court.
Wolff wrote that Trump, a businessman himself, saw the whole debacle as a “business tragedy” and that Weissmann should have been disbarred. As he has done for his political opponents, Trump came up with a mocking nickname: “Arthur Weissmann.”
But Wolff asserted the Andersen setback only made Weissmann appear to be more of a threat to Trump.
“To the degree that the Andersen case might have tainted Weissmann, it also reinforced his reputation for waging total war. For Weissmann, overreach was something of a philosophical belief: in his view, white-collar criminals were trying to beat the system, so the system had to beat them. And Donald Trump’s entire life and career were about beating the system,” Wolff wrote.
In March 2018, Wolff wrote that the Weissmann-led team laid out the indictment, which charged Trump with obstructing an investigation, tampering with a witness, and retaliating against a witness. Wolff said his reporting was “based on internal documents given to me by sources close to the Office of the Special Counsel.”
Wolff’s last book, Fire and Fury, was riddled with unsubstantiated allegations, several of which were denounced as false. His new book is already facing accusations of falsehoods, and in an interview with the New York Times the author admitted he does not check his stories with his subjects.
In response to Mueller’s spokesman denying that a draft indictment was drawn up, Wolff insisted that a memorandum was put together that supposes Trump was indicted for obstruction of justice.
“The document is a 56-page document. It assumes that the president has been indicted. It assumes that he in turn has come back and made a motion to dismiss that indictment on grounds that you can’t indict a sitting president,” Wolff said in an interview Monday evening on MSNBC. “Then this document is a response to that.”
Wolff said the document outlined what charges Trump would face and argued why a sitting president can and should be indicted. “So it’s in a way I think that missing piece of the Mueller puzzle,” Wolff said.
When asked by MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell to divulge whether his sources were in the Mueller team, Wolff would only say that these were “gold standard” sources.
