Two crimes benefited Trump’s campaign in
2016. Ever since, the president has worked to block scrutiny of those schemes.
By
July 17, 2020 at 6:49 a.m. CDT
A porn
star was paid to keep silent about her alleged dalliance years earlier with a
presidential candidate, which a judge has agreed was an illegal violation of
campaign finance laws.
The
private emails of Democrats were stolen and published, which prosecutors have
said was an illegal intervention into the U.S. political system by foreign
operatives.
The two
crimes were undertaken to help Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016. They led to the
indictment or conviction of 13 men, including Trump’s personal attorney.
But for
nearly four years, Trump has bullied, browbeaten and litigated his way out of
efforts to pin down whether he had involvement in or knowledge of the illicit
actions that were undertaken to help his presidential campaign.
Legal
experts said his commutation last week of the sentence of confidant Roger
Stone, who had been convicted of lying to Congress about his efforts to
interact with WikiLeaks while it was publishing the hacked Democratic emails,
was part of a pattern in which Trump flexed the powers of his office and his
platform to evade scrutiny of his actions.
It is a
pattern that vexed special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who devoted
substantial space in his report on election interference to Trump’s tactics but
ultimately declined to come to a conclusion as to whether they constituted
crimes, an ongoing source of frustration to Democratic lawmakers and some legal
experts. And it has emerged as an issue for Trump’s reelection as critics
accuse him of corrupting the government and the justice system to serve his
personal needs.
“He’s
resisted cooperation with all manner of duly authorized investigations — it’s a
comprehensive stonewalling to protect his legal and political liabilities,”
said Alan Charles Raul, who served as associate counsel to President Ronald
Reagan and now is representing Stone jurors in a proceeding to determine
whether confidential juror questionnaires will be made public.
“I
think he signals clearly to his subordinates, others in government and people
outside government that if they don’t rat him out, if they don’t flip and
cooperate with government investigators, then they’ll be rewarded. If they do
cooperate with criminal or congressional investigations, he will retaliate,” he
added.
Trump’s
commutation for Stone came after months of praising his old friend for publicly
promising to never provide damaging information about the president to
prosecutors.
Stone
told Fox News’s Sean Hannity this week that his silence was an effort to avoid
bearing “false witness against the president” and that he had refused to “lie
against my friend of 40 years so they could use it for impeachment.”
In a
statement to The Washington Post, he added he has never implied that he knew of
misconduct by Trump and remained silent in exchange for clemency. “That is not
true,” he said. But in his report, Mueller contemplated whether Stone’s silence
was indeed intended to help Trump. Stone has said that he had extensive contact
with the candidate during the campaign.
The
Stone clemency was only the latest example of Trump’s attempts to tilt the
scales of justice in his favor.
Trump
refused to be interviewed by Mueller, submitting only written answers that
Mueller indicated in his report last year were “incomplete and imprecise.”
He
fought all the way to the Supreme Court to avoid turning over documents related
to the hush-money payments to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office — the
court ruled last week that Trump does not have blanket immunity for the inquiry
but sent the case back to a lower court, meaning more delay.
He
berated and threatened witnesses who implicated him in wrongdoing — like his
former attorney Michael Cohen, who testified that Trump directed him to pay
adult-film actress Stormy Daniels for her silence before the 2016 election.
Meanwhile,
Trump praised those who refused to provide information about him, like Stone
and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who a judge found continued to lie
to prosecutors even after pleading guilty to financial crimes related to
lobbying work in Ukraine and pledging to cooperate.
The
president has publicly castigated judges and jurors who have ruled against his
interests, refused to allow top aides to testify before Congress, fired
inspectors general within his administration, and, starting with campaign
chants about opponent Hillary Clinton, threatened to lock up his enemies and
spare his allies.
Trump
this week justified extending clemency to Stone by saying the political
operative had been caught up in an “investigation that should have never taken
place.” He said Stone “wasn’t given a fair trial” and had been “treated very
unfairly.” His decision to help his friend, he asserted, was receiving “rave
reviews.”
Stone
likewise complained to Hannity of “politically motivated prosecutors,” “a
biased judge” and a “stacked jury.”
Still,
while charges against Stone were initially filed by the special counsel’s
office, he was prosecuted not on accusations of lying to the special counsel
but of lying to the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee while it was
investigating Russian interference in the election.
At
Stone’s trial, which took place after Mueller’s office had disbanded, the
prosecution was handled by the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. He was convicted
by a jury of 12 citizens and sentenced by a federal judge who said that his
lies impeded an investigation that was “a matter of grave national importance.”
Attorney
General William P. Barr, who had intervened in the case to push for a lesser
sentence than that initially recommended by the career prosecutors who handled
it, nevertheless told ABC News last week that the prosecution had been
“righteous.”
Despite
bragging before the election of having a back channel to WikiLeaks, Stone has
since Trump’s victory insisted that his boasts were empty and that he was not
in contact with the group and had no advance knowledge of its plans to release
documents U.S. intelligence has concluded were stolen by Russian operatives.
But
Mueller’s report pointed to the possibility that Stone might have known more than
he has so far admitted and could know information that could hurt Trump.
If
Mueller had been able to show that Stone tipped off Trump in advance to the
WikiLeaks releases, for instance, something both have denied, it would have
upended four years of Trump’s narrative about how the 2016 campaign unfolded.
Even
had Stone told prosecutors merely that he and Trump spoke about WikiLeaks, his
answers would have contradicted Trump’s written answers to Mueller, which were
submitted under penalty of perjury. But Stone’s silence meant prosecutors could
not explore whether Trump’s answers had been truthful.
In his
written submission, the president wrote that he did “not recall discussing
WikiLeaks” with Stone, nor did he “recall being aware of Mr. Stone having discussed
WikiLeaks with individuals associated with my campaign.”
But in
his report, Mueller explained that several other campaign officials testified
that during the campaign, Trump had discussed WikiLeaks with Stone, that Trump
was told Stone had access to WikiLeaks and that Trump had directed people to
stay in contact with Stone about WikiLeaks.
Deputy
campaign manager Rick Gates told investigators that Stone told him even before
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange announced in June 2016 that he would publish information
related to the campaign that something “big” was coming and that he thought
Assange had Hillary Clinton’s emails.
Cohen
told prosecutors that shortly before WikiLeaks first released Democratic Party
emails in July 2016, he was in Trump’s office in New York when the candidate
received a phone call from Stone and placed it on speakerphone. According to
Cohen, Stone told Trump that he had just spoken to Assange and learned that the
group would be releasing information in a matter of days.
Mueller
wrote that evidence existed that Trump “likely understood that Stone could
potentially provide evidence that would be adverse to the President.” Mueller
wrote that it was possible Trump simply did not have a clear recollection of
his campaign conversations with Stone. But he wrote it was also possible
Trump’s treatment of Stone demonstrated that he understood that if Stone
talked, he’d “provide evidence that would run counter to the President’s
denials and would link the President to Stone’s efforts to reach out to
WikiLeaks.”
“It
seems unprovable — but highly likely to me — that truthful testimony by Roger
Stone would have implicated that claim and given lie to it,” said Paul
Rosenzweig, a lawyer who served on the independent counsel team that
investigated President Bill Clinton.
In a
statement, Stone said he was offered “unspecified leniency” by the special
counsel team in exchange for evidence he communicated with Russians to help the
campaign. He said he had no such evidence and refused — and Mueller could find
nothing else to support the allegation in all of his emails, text messages or
phone records and ultimately did not claim the allegation against either him or
Trump.
Stone
noted that he long ago made public his only text exchange with Guccifer 2.0 —
the online persona U.S. intelligence would later identify as having been backed
by Russian intelligence — that the messages came only after WikiLeaks had
published material and that the exchange, which he termed “innocuous and
innocent,” provided “no evidence of collusion or collaboration.” “If Mueller
had evidence I was involved with Russian efforts to obtain and disseminate
stolen data, why didn’t he bring such an indictment?” he wrote.
Ultimately,
Mueller also offered no judgment as to whether any of Trump’s efforts to impede
or derail the investigation constituted a crime.
But he
devoted 36 pages to exploring whether Trump’s treatment of witnesses in the
investigation, including Cohen and Stone, as well as former national security
adviser Michael Flynn and Manafort, might constitute obstruction of justice.
When it
came to Cohen, Trump’s treatment of his former personal attorney changed
quickly after Cohen began working with prosecutors.
When
Cohen initially lied to reporters and told them he used his own money to pay
Daniels $130,000 in exchange for her pre-election silence about a 2006 sexual
encounter that Trump has since denied, he soon received a text from another of
Trump’s personal attorneys that read, “client says thanks for what you do.”
When his home and office were raided by the FBI, Trump called him to tell him
to “hang in there” and “stay strong.”
But
after Cohen began cooperating with investigators, Trump’s attitude changed. He
accused Cohen of lying to get a better deal, called him a “rat,” and said his
wife and father-in-law had committed crimes.
Cohen
pleaded guilty in 2018 to financial crimes, lying to Congress and campaign
finance violations stemming from the hush-money payments. He told a judge that
he made the payments at Trump’s direction and later released copies of Trump
Organization checks he received as reimbursement, signed by the president and
his son Donald Trump Jr.
In
2019, federal prosecutors signaled they had ended their investigation into the
matter, but local prosecutors in Manhattan have been exploring whether the
Trump Organization falsified business records to conceal the payments to
Daniels. Trump has denied Daniels’s account of their liaison but has refused to
turn over documents in response to subpoenas in the matter, arguing in court
that as president, he has absolute immunity from any criminal investigation.
By a
7-to-2 vote, the Supreme Court last week rejected that argument, saying the president
is not above the law. But they sent the case back to lower courts to see
whether Trump has any other grounds to resist the subpoenas.
Citing
the ruling, Rosenzweig said he does not believe Trump has thwarted inquiry for
all time.
“I
would say,” he added, “that he has thus far thwarted it quite successfully.”
This story has been updated to include further comment from
Stone.
Devlin Barrett and Manuel Roig-Franzia contributed to this
report.
