President Donald Trump is desperate to make himself the victim. After being impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives and earning bipartisan support for conviction in the Senate, President Donald Trump has retreated to his familiar false claims about the Russia investigation: that it was biased, that it was a waste of time and money, and that it exonerated him. He is, as The Washington Post’s Philip Rucker wrote, trying to “rewrite history” to portray himself—and Russia—as targets of an illegal “witch hunt” rather than as complicit in one of the worst attacks on American democracy in history.

As with the rest of the Trump team’s arguments, their attacks on the Mueller investigation continue to be both irrelevant to the charges at hand and outright false. The Mueller investigation not only resulted in 37 indictments, including eight convictions, seven of which came via guilty pleas; it also uncovered both collusion and obstruction of justice. It is vital that the public understand the truth.

Trump and his attorney general William Barr’s efforts to derail the sentencing of Roger Stone show how far they are willing to go to distract from and cover up Trump’s personal involvement in collusion in 2016.

Trump and Barr aren’t just interfering to protect Stone—they’re doing it because Stone’s indictment and the Mueller report show that Stone was acting at the direct behest of high-ranking members of the Trump campaign, including Trump himself.

The Trump campaign’s CEO, Steve Bannon, and deputy campaign chairman, Rick Gates, understood full well that they were colluding. According to the U.S. Department of Justice’s latest sentencing memo: “Both Gates and Bannon believed that Stone was providing them with non-public information about WikiLeaks’ plans” to release emails the Russian government had stolen from the Clinton campaign, and “Bannon viewed Stone as the Trump campaign’s access point to WikiLeaks.”

Stone was, in other words, acting on Trump’s personal order to his inner circle to “get the emails” they knew Russia had stolen from their political opponents.

Trump and Barr leapt into action after prosecutors initially recommended that Stone serve seven to nine years in prison for lying about and attempting to cover up his work as a backchannel between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks.

After Trump criticized the sentencing recommendation on Twitter, calling it “horrible and very unfair,” the DOJ backtracked, saying that it would be pursuing a lesser sentence for Stone. Barr claims this decision was made before Trump’s complaint but has offered no supporting evidence. Meanwhile, Trump personally congratulated Barr for “taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought.” Since the DOJ’s announcement, all four prosecutors who were part of Mueller’s team and were involved in Stone’s prosecution have filed to withdraw from the case.



Stone’s backchannel was part of a larger strategy of collusion.

Trump and his team obstructed justice to cover up their crimes.

Trump is attempting to rewrite the history of the Mueller investigation, perpetuating a myth of victimhood.

Trump’s defenders spent the impeachment scandal deploying a disinformation campaign to discredit the Russia investigation and portray the president as the victim of a deep-state conspiracy. Now, they’ve come full circle, using their self-declared exoneration from the Mueller report—a narrative that his team fabricated—to justify Trump’s continued attacks on American democracy, from demanding investigations into the debunked “CrowdStrike” conspiracy theory to pressuring the DOJ to produce an anti-Mueller report he can use “as a cudgel in his reelection campaign.”

It is vital that the American public understand that Mueller’s report was not a failure; it was the single most damning document ever produced about a sitting U.S. president.