Thursday I surveyed the entire Mueller report. I read some sections carefully; I skimmed others. My job was to anchor Lawfare’s initial coverage, so I needed to have a sense of the big picture, as well as detailed knowledge of certain findings and arguments. Starting Friday, however, I am reading the entire document carefully, starting at the beginning. I’m writing up my thoughts as I go in this post. There will be no cohesive argument to this journal. It will simply be a collection of my observations, questions and thoughts as I go through the document. It will get long. I will not attempt to summarize the underlying document, merely to reflect on it, but I will organize this post by document section. I will update the post as I read. I hope people find it useful.

The following table of contents are links to the sections of this journal, which correspond to sections of the report itself:

Introduction to Volume I

The Special Counsel Investigation

Russian "Active Measures" Social Media Campaign

GRU Hacking Directed at the Clinton Campaign

Russian Government Links to and Contacts with the Trump Campaign

Prosecution and Declination Decisions

Introduction to Volume II

Background Legal and Evidentiary Principles

Factual Results of the Obstruction Investigation

B. The President's Conduct Concerning the Investigation of Michael Flynn

C. The President's Reaction to Public Confirmation of the FBI's Russia Investigation

D. Events Leading Up to and Surrounding the Termination of FBI Director Comey

E. The President's Efforts to Remove the Special Counsel

F. The President's Efforts to Curtail the Special Counsel Investigation

G. The President's Efforts to Prevent Disclosure of Emails About the June 9, 2016, Meeting Between Russians and Senior Campaign Officials

H. The President’s Further Efforts to Have the Attorney General Take Over the Investigations

I. The President Orders McGahn to Deny That the President Tried to Fire the Special Counsel

J. The President’s Conduct Toward Flynn, Manafort, [REDACTED]

K. The President’s Conduct Involving Michael Cohen

L. Overarching Factual Issues

Legal Defense to the Application of Obstruction-of-Justice Statutes to the President

Introduction to Volume I

This is a short little section, barely two pages, but it has several interesting items in it, starting with Mueller’s almost casual endorsement of the FBI’s historical account of the Russia investigation’s origins. In the middle of page 1, Mueller describes the investigation as beginning when “a foreign government contacted the FBI about a May 2016 encounter with Trump Campaign foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos.” Papadopoulos, Mueller writes, had “suggested to a representative of that foreign government that the Trump Campaign had received indications from the Russian government that it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.” It was that information, the paragraph concludes, that “prompted the FBI on July 31, 2016, to open an investigation into whether individuals associated with the Trump Campaign were coordinating with the Russian government in its interference activities.”

Sorry, Devin Nunes. There's no mention of the Steele Dossier.

Lower down on the same page begins the actual quotation that Attorney General William Barr quoted partially—and, as it turns out, quite distortedly—in his letter of March 24, 2019 announcing the top-line conclusions of the report. Barr wrote: “The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As the report states: ‘[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.’” Here’s what Mueller actually wrote: “The investigation also identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign. Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

Oh.

New York Times reporter Charlie Savage has an excellent piece identifying the rather numerous times Barr selectively and distortively quoted Mueller to convey something friendlier to the president than the actual report conveys.

Barely a paragraph later, Mueller clarifies something else that should embarrass Barr. At his press conference Thursday, Barr repeatedly described the special counsel’s office as having found no evidence of Trump campaign “collusion” with Russia. Mueller’s report introduction throws two wrenches into this account. First, Mueller makes clear that when the report concludes that “the investigation did not establish particular facts” this “does not mean there was no evidence of those facts.”

Oh.

In the next paragraph, Mueller articulates his understanding of the relationship between the terms “collusion,” “coordination” and “conspiracy”:

In evaluating whether evidence about collective action of multiple individuals constituted a crime, we applied the framework of conspiracy law, not the concept of “collusion.” In so doing, the Office recognized that the word “collud[e]” was used in communications with the Acting Attorney General confirming certain aspects of the investigation's scope and that the term has frequently been invoked in public reporting about the investigation. But collusion is not a specific offense or theory of liability found in the United States Code, nor is it a term of art in federal criminal law. For those reasons, the Office’s focus in analyzing questions of joint criminal liability was on conspiracy as defined in federal law. In connection with that analysis, we addressed the factual question whether members of the Trump Campaign “coordinat[ed]”—a term that appears in the appointment order—with Russian election interference activities. Like collusion, “coordination” does not have a settled definition in federal criminal law. We understood coordination to require an agreement—tacit or express—between the Trump Campaign and the Russian government on election interference. That requires more than the two parties taking actions that were informed by or responsive to the other's actions or interests. We applied the term coordination in that sense when stating in the report that the investigation did not establish that the Trump Campaign coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.

Oh.

In other words, when the attorney general states that “there was in fact no collusion,” that the special counsel found “no underlying collusion with Russia,” that Mueller “did not find that the Trump campaign or other Americans colluded in [the Russian] schemes,” and that Mueller “did not find any conspiracy to violate U.S. law involving Russia-linked persons and any persons associated with the Trump campaign,” Barr is being misleading both as to what Mueller examined and as to what Mueller does and does not mean when he says he did not establish or find something.

The Special Counsel Investigation

The first notable thing about this section is that it very clearly lays out how Mueller understood and operationalized his jurisdiction—which was both quite limited and which Mueller largely did not seek to expand. This makes the Mueller investigation highly unusual in the history of special counsel investigations, which we normally think of as hoarding jurisdiction and as ever-expanding in their scope.

Mueller, by contrast, makes clear that his jurisdiction was narrow. It was defined by a series of orders and clarifications from Rod Rosenstein, the first of which defined three elements: (1) “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump,” (2) any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation, and (3) “any other matters within the scope of 28 C.F.R. § 600.4(a)”—which covers efforts to obstruct special counsel investigations. To this basic mandate, Rosenstein later clarified two points in a separate letter: He made clear that it included allegations involving Carter Page, Paul Manafort and George Papadopoulos in their possible “collusion” with Russia, and he made clear that it included as well allegations about Manafort’s dealings with Ukraine and another corruption matter. Rosenstein later wrote an additional letter clarifying that the original order also applied to Michael Cohen, Richard Gates, Roger Stone and two other names that are redacted for privacy reasons.

Mueller has hewed closely to this original mandate. Unlike prior special counsel’s offices, as matters came to him that pushed the edges of his jurisdiction, he referred them to other Justice Department components. He also referred matters at the end of his investigation that were ongoing. A list of all of the referrals appears in Appendix D of the report, which lists 10 transfers of cases begun by the special counsel’s office and an additional 14 “referrals,” which Mueller describes as covering “evidence of potential criminal activity that was outside the scope of the Special Counsel’s jurisdiction.” These referrals are, with the exception of the Michael Cohen campaign finance matters and the Greg Craig Foreign Agents Registration Act matter, all redacted.

Call them children of the Mueller investigation—and keep a close eye on them.

A note on staffing. President Trump has repeatedly referred to the Mueller investigation as composed of 13 or 17 or 18 “angry Democrats,” so let’s get on the record exactly how the Mueller investigation was staffed in reality. There were 19 lawyers at the investigation’s “high point”—five from private practice and 14 on detail from elsewhere in the Justice Department. They had a filter team from the department and FBI to screen for privileged material. They had three paralegals. They had an administrative staff of nine. And they worked alongside “approximately 40 FBI agents, intelligence analysts, forensic accountants” and others assigned to the office. FBI staff “remained under FBI supervision at all times; the matters on which they assisted were supervised by the Special Counsel.”

There’s no word about any party affiliation of any of the staff—much less about their anger level.

There is word, however, about an important matter that has been something of a mystery throughout the Mueller investigation: What sort of investigation was this?

Because the Mueller investigation was born out of a counterintelligence investigation, there has been an enduring impression that it had both criminal and counterintelligence elements. I have assumed this myself at times. How these two very different missions integrated within the Mueller probe has been much discussed. This section of the report answers this question, and the answer is actually striking: The Mueller investigation was a criminal probe. Full stop.

It was not a counterintelligence probe. Mueller both says this directly in this section and also says what happened to the counterintelligence investigation. Here’s how Mueller describes his investigation: “The Special Counsel structured the investigation in view of his power and authority ‘to exercise all investigative and prosecutorial functions of any United States Attorney.’ 28 C.F.R, § 600.6. Like a U.S. Attorney's Office, the Special Counsel’s Office considered a range of classified and unclassified information available to the FBI in the course of the Office's Russia investigation, and the Office structured that work around evidence for possible use in prosecutions of federal crimes ...” (emphasis added).

At the bottom of page 13, Mueller then answers the question of what happened to the counterintelligence components of the investigation. They stayed in the FBI:

From its inception, the Office recognized that its investigation could identify foreign intelligence and counterintelligence information relevant to the FBI’s broader national security mission. FBI personnel who assisted the Office established procedures to identify and convey such information to the FBI. The FBI’s Counterintelligence Division met with the Office regularly for that purpose for most of the Office’s tenure. For more than the past year, the FBI also embedded personnel at the Office who did not work on the Special Counsel’s investigation, but whose purpose was to review the results of the investigation and to send—in writing—summaries of foreign intelligence and counterintelligence information to FBIHQ and FBI Field Offices. Those communications and other correspondence between the Office and the FBI contain information derived from the investigation, not all of which is contained in this Volume. This Volume is a summary. It contains, in the Office’s judgment, that information necessary to account for the Special Counsel’s prosecution and declination decisions and to describe the investigation’s main factual results.

In other words, the Mueller probe was a criminal probe only. It had embedded FBI personnel sending back to the FBI material germane to the FBI’s counterintelligence mission. But Mueller does not appear to have taken on any counterintelligence investigative function. And the report is purely an account through the lens of the criminal law. This partly, though only partly, explains why there is no classified information in the report, which contains no “portion markings” anywhere.

This point has a major analytical consequence for the entire way one reads the Mueller report: Don’t assume it answers counterintelligence questions. Where it concludes that someone didn’t engage in a conspiracy, don’t confuse that with answering the question of whether there is some counterintelligence risk associated with that person. Instead, read the report only as an account of the disposition of the criminal questions associated with L'Affaire Russe. But keep in mind the following question as well: If I were an FBI counterintelligence agent and I knew this material, how concerned would I be about the individual in question?

I will try to flag such questions as I go through the report.

Russian “Active Measures” Social Media Campaign

The Mueller report’s discussion of the Russian social media campaign is the section of the report that is most truly exonerating of Trump and his campaign—at least in the criminal sense. Yes, the Russians duped Trump campaign figures into promoting their material, but nobody appears to have deliberately done so. Mueller’s statement that the “investigation did not identify evidence that any U.S. persons knowingly and intentionally coordinated with the [Internet Research Agency’s] interference operations” is a stronger statement than the “did not establish” language that Mueller uses to indicate that evidence is insufficient to prove something. Here he actually seems to be saying that the investigation did not produce evidence at all of knowing participation in the scheme.

The story the report tells, however, is disturbing on its own terms. It appears to be largely the same as the story told in the IRA indictment, though major redactions in this section—all presumably the result of the pending IRA indictment—impair one’s ability to read it. There are some new details, and there are presumably more such details in the redacted sections. But the broad story is one we already know.

It is a story of failed immunity on the U.S. side to outside interference—and aggressive Russian exploitation of the absence of democratic antibodies to fight off such manipulation. The IRA was able to reach tens of millions of U.S. persons using its social media accounts. It was able to trick prominent people into engaging with and promoting its dummy accounts. It was able to exploit social media companies. And it was able to make a series of contacts with Trump campaign affiliates and get Trump figures—including Trump himself—to engage with and promote social media content that came from a hostile power’s covert efforts to influence the American electorate. Though not intentional or criminal on the U.S. side, this pattern shows a troubling degree of vulnerability on the part of the U.S. political system to outside influence campaigns.

And while Trump and his people did not “collude” with the operation, they did fall for it. The investigation identified “multiple occasions” on which “members and surrogates of the Trump Campaign promoted ... pro-Trump or anti-Clinton content published by the IRA” or engaged directly with IRA trolls. Mueller notes that the “investigation identified no similar connections between the IRA and the Clinton Campaign.” To some degree, no doubt, this was because the IRA message was hostile to Clinton and thus not something her people would want to engage. But no doubt the Trump folks were also particularly vulnerable to this sort of manipulation. While they weren’t active partners in this scheme, they were suckers.

One important question the report does not answer, almost certainly because of redactions, is to what extent the IRA operation was directed by the Russian government. The organization’s head is famously close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, though the organization is a private company, not on its face a government operation. While I think it’s reasonable to assume that the operation was state sanctioned, if not state run, the portion of the report that presumably specifies the operation’s relationship to the Russian state is all redacted. So that has to remain a strong hypothesis for now.

The gravamen of this section of the report, in short, is that a lot of entities and individuals contributed to an ecosystem in which a foreign actor—almost certainly at the behest of a foreign government—could run a major disinformation and influence operation against the U.S. electorate. Those actors included a lot of people associated with Trump. While this was not criminal and, indeed, nobody on the U.S. side appears to have intended to do anything wrong, the cumulative result is an unacceptable degree of vulnerability to such malign foreign operations.

The solution to this problem is not simple. The social media companies obviously have a role to play in better policing their platforms. But some of the solution has to come from individuals, particularly prominent individuals, being willing to take more care about sharing on social media content the provenance of which they are not certain. That obviously includes the president and his family members and campaign staff.

GRU Hacking Directed at the Clinton Campaign

If the active measures section of the report is exonerating of Trump and his campaign, the section that follows it—the Russian hacking section—is not. It is much worse than is commonly understood for Trump. Just how damning it is has gone somewhat unnoticed for, I think, four reasons. First, like the social media discussion, the hacking section to some degree tracks material already in a Mueller indictment—in this case, the GRU indictment—so what is new is woven in among already familiar material. Second, as with the IRA discussion, there is no ultimate decision to charge anyone on the U.S. side with participation in the hacking. Third, a key portion of this section is significantly impaired by redactions. And finally, the story Mueller is telling here is one that's a little different from the one everyone was looking for. The result of these four factors in combination is that the full story Mueller presents has not quite come through.

So let’s tease it out, because it’s actually a whopper.

On the Russian hacking itself, the report contains a lot of new detail but not a lot that fundamentally changes our understanding of the Russian operation. And yes, Mueller does not appear to have developed evidence that anyone associated with the Trump campaign was involved in the hacking operation itself.

But here’s the thing: It wasn’t for lack of trying. Indeed, the Mueller report makes clear that Trump personally ordered an attempt to obtain Hillary Clinton’s emails; and people associated with the campaign pursued this believing they were dealing with Russian hackers. Trump also personally engaged in discussions about coordinating public relations strategy around WikiLeaks releases of hacked emails. At least one person associated with the campaign was in touch directly with the Guccifer 2.0 persona of the GRU. And Donald Trump Jr. was directly in touch with WikiLeaks itself—from whom he obtained a password to a hacked database. There are reasons none of these incidents amount to crimes—good reasons, in my view, in most cases, viable judgment calls in others. But the picture it all paints of the president’s conduct is anything but exonerating.

This was not “no collusion.” It was Keystone Kollusion—and the incompetence of it is likely the reason no crime was committed.

The first important point here is that the GRU and the Trump campaign—including Trump himself—were not operating in parallel worlds but in iterative interaction with one another. On July 27, 2016, Trump in a speech publicly called for Russia to release Hillary Clinton’s missing server emails: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” The reference here was not to the hacking the GRU had done over the past few months but to the hypothesized compromise of Clinton’s private email server some time earlier—an event that there is no particular reason to believe took place at all.

The GRU, like many Trump supporters, took Trump seriously, but not literally. “Within approximately five hours of Trump’s announcement,” Mueller writes, “GRU officers targeted for the first time Clinton’s personal office.” In other words, the GRU appears to have responded to Trump's call for Russia to release a set of Clinton's emails the Russians likely never hacked and thus did not have by launching a new wave of attacks aimed at other materials.

Trump has since insisted that he was joking in that speech. But the public comments mirrored private orders. After the speech, “Trump asked individuals affiliated with his Campaign to find the deleted Clinton emails,” the report states. “Michael Flynn ... recalled that Trump made this request repeatedly, and Flynn subsequently contacted multiple people in an effort to obtain the emails.”

Oh.

Two of the people contacted by Flynn were Barbara Ledeen and Peter Smith. Ledeen had been working on recovering the emails for a while already, Mueller reports. Smith, only weeks after Trump’s speech, sprang into action himself on the subject. The result was the operation about which Matt Tait wrote a firsthand account on Lawfare. “The investigation established that Smith communicated with at least [campaign officials] Flynn and [Sam] Clovis about his search for the deleted Clinton emails,” Mueller writes, though “the Office did not identify evidence that any of the listed individuals initiated or directed Smith’s efforts.” Ledeen obtained emails that proved to be not authentic. Smith, for his part, “drafted multiple emails stating or intimating that he was in contact with Russian hackers”—though Mueller notes that the investigation “did not establish that Smith was in contact with Russian hackers or that Smith, Ledeen, or other individuals in touch with the Trump Campaign ultimately obtained the deleted Clinton emails.”

In other words, it wasn’t that Trump was above dealing with Russian hackers to get Hillary Clinton’s emails. He not only called publicly on the Russians to deliver the goods on his opponent, but he also privately ordered his campaign to seek the material out. He did this knowing himself—clear from his public statements and very clear from the actions of those who acted on his request—that Russia would or might be the source.

The reason there’s no foul here is only that the whole thing was a wild conspiracy theory. The idea that the missing 30,000 emails had been retrieved was never more than conjecture, after all. The idea that they would be easily retrievable from the “dark web” was a kind of fantasy. In other words, even as a real hacking operation was going on, Trump personally, his campaign and his campaign followers were actively attempting to collude with a fake hacking operation that wasn’t going on.

It is not illegal to imagine stolen emails and try to retrieve them from imagined hackers. But it’s morally little different from being spoon-fed information by Russian intelligence. The Trump campaign was seeking exactly the spoon-feeding it was accused of taking; it just couldn’t manage to find the right spoon, and it kept missing when it tried to put any spoons in its mouth.

As to the real hacking operation, that one didn’t need Trump’s help. The Guccifer 2.0 persona had direct contact with Roger Stone (whose name is redacted in the description in the report) in August and September of 2016, Mueller reports. But the GRU had its own distribution mechanisms and didn’t need to engage directly with the Trump campaign or its surrogates. As the operation progressed, WikiLeaks handled the distribution, and both the campaign and the GRU dealt with WikiLeaks—and thus didn't have to deal directly with one another.

The full parameters of the relationship between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks, as described by the report, remain obscure because of redactions. The redacted material involves the activities of Roger Stone, whose case is pending and who purported to serve as the intermediary between the campaign and WikiLeaks. That said, words readable between redactions make clear that:

“by late summer of 2016, the Trump Campaign was planning a press strategy, a communications campaign, and messaging based on the possible release of Clinton emails by WikiLeaks.”

“While Trump and Gates were driving to LaGuardia Airport,” there was a phone call of some kind, and “shortly after the call candidate Trump told Gates that more release of damaging information would be coming”; and

Donald Trump Jr. had direct communications with WikiLeaks, which gave him the password to the website of an anti-Trump PAC and suggested social media material to promote.

In short, while this section does not describe a Trump campaign conspiracy in the Russian hacks, it does describe direct engagement between the GRU and Stone; it describes both the campaign and the GRU seeking to coordinate with WikiLeaks on the release of information; and it describes the campaign being eager to retrieve what turned out to be fictitious emails and its agents being willing to deal with Russian hackers to get them. The president personally was involved in these latter two episodes, Mueller reports.

It’s a remarkable story, and it's not a flattering one. If nobody ran afoul of the law, the likeliest explanation is the dumbest of dumb luck.