One year ago—on May 17, 2017—deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein signed Order 3915-2017. To “ensure a full and thorough investigation of the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election,” he appointed former FBI director Robert Mueller to be special counsel for the Department of Justice to inquire into “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump” and “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.”
Rosenstein’s decision was the right one, and the context in which he made that decision ought to be remembered.
In February 2017, Michael Flynn resigned as national security adviser—he had been on the job for only 24 days—after it became clear that, despite public statements by administration officials to the contrary, he had privately discussed economic sanctions on Russia with the country’s ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, during the presidential transition. Three months later, on May 9, the new president unexpectedly fired FBI director James Comey. Then on May 16, the New York Times reported the existence of a memo in which Comey described Trump’s asking him to drop the investigation of Flynn. “I hope you can see your way to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Comey claimed Trump said to him. “He’s a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”
With news that Russia had tried to interfere in the presidential election, questions naturally arose about the Trump campaign’s knowledge of—and perhaps involvement in—the Kremlin’s efforts. Some of the frenzy was inspired by Democrats’ inability to cope with the fact that they had lost a winnable election because they chose to run a corrupt and disliked candidate, but Russia’s activities were aggressively seditious and demanded a response. The reason that it was Rosenstein and not Attorney General Jeff Sessions who appointed Mueller, remember, was that Sessions had recused himself from investigations of the election-meddling after it became known that he had communicated with Russian officials and hadn’t disclosed this fact in his confirmation hearings. The Russians, it seemed, were everywhere.
Comey would later testify that he deliberately leaked his memo in order to prompt an investigation—yet another example of the lack of judgment that so sullied the reputation of the FBI during the election. But if it wasn’t already clear that an investigation was called for, the need for Mueller’s probe quickly became self-evident. The Washington Post reported that just after the 2016 election Jared Kushner, the president-elect’s son-in-law, asked Kislyak if officials from the incoming administration could use Russian diplomatic facilities to communicate with the Kremlin, a bizarre request that could only come from someone who wanted to avoid detection by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence.
Then, in July, the New York Times learned that in 2016, Kushner, Donald Trump Jr., and Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort met with a woman claiming both connection with Vladimir Putin and to have damaging information on Hillary Clinton. Trump’s supporters argued that this was routine campaign hardball. But these weren’t campaign lackeys checking a shady source who wanted to pass on some oppo research; they were the campaign’s top figures meeting with someone explicitly professing to speak for the Kremlin. It wasn’t evidence of the campaign colluding with Russia, but it was evidence that some of Trump’s top advisers were willing to collude.
Perhaps that’s why they lied about the meeting—again and again. Having been caught, the Trump team hastily abandoned its original claim that there were no meetings with Russians. The new spin: The meeting was about adoptions, not the election. That one didn’t last long, either, once it was clear that investigators had detailed information about the meeting. Having been caught lying again, the Trump team acknowledged that the meeting had been proposed by Russians representing themselves as emissaries for the government for the purposes of sharing dirt on Hillary Clinton.
If the Mueller investigation uncovers nothing else, it’s worth knowing that top advisers to President Trump were eager to work with an increasingly hostile adversary for the purposes of winning an election. That may not be prosecutable, but it’s not normal.
In August 2017, the special counsel impaneled a grand jury in Washington. Thus far he has indicted 19 people and three companies. Many of these seem to have richly deserved their comeuppance—Manafort and business partner Rick Gates for acting as agents for Kremlin-backed Ukrainian officials and hiding large financial gains from the IRS; 13 Russian nationals for conspiracy and identity theft. Others were indicted not for an underlying crime but for lying to investigators—Flynn, the otherwise unknown Trump campaign “adviser” George Papadopoulos, and the Gates-connected attorney Alex van der Zwaan.
The public has not yet seen hard evidence that either Trump or a senior campaign official actively colluded with the Russian government to affect the outcome of the election. The indictments have to do with “matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.”
Any investigation of this sort is bound to have its detractors, and in the present case the detractors weren’t wrong to express dismay over the fact that one of Mueller’s staff, FBI agent Peter Strzok, had in 2016 exchanged texts with a female colleague (and lover) about the need to ensure Hillary Clinton’s election. Very much to his credit, Mueller demoted Strzok long before the press knew anything about the texts. But the fact that he once served on Mueller’s team and before that had investigated the Clinton email scandal rankled.
Other controversies, not originating from the Mueller investigation but bound up with it, complicate the public’s perception. Credible sources have raised concerns about irregularities in “unmasking” requests made by Obama officials in the closing months of that administration. There remain serious questions about the provenance of the so-called Steele dossier and how it was used. Top Obama-era intelligence officials have told contradicting stories. These are the kinds of inconsistencies that beg for skepticism and deeper reporting, but in which too many of our friends in the mainstream media are utterly uninterested.
Robert Mueller is everything we value in a public servant—honest, competent, utterly averse to partisan hackery. His investigation is not, as Trump complains, a “witch hunt.” He has done valuable work, and, we repeat, the deputy attorney general was right to appoint him. We’re confident that his conclusions will be based on facts and evidence. But it has been a year of acrimony. If Donald Trump and his aides received help from the Russian government to win the election, Americans should know it and the offenders should stand trial. If they did not, or if such a thing can’t be proved, Americans should be told that, too. The hour is late.
