Robert Mueller arrives to speak to employees at FBI headquarters in Washington in April 2009. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/Bloomberg
Special Counsel Robert Mueller III found evidence suggesting President Donald Trump’s public comments during the prosecution of Paul Manafort were intended to encourage his former campaign chairman to not cooperate with the government—and possibly to also sway the jury that would find Manafort guilty of financial fraud, according to a 448-page report released Thursday summarizing the Russia investigation.
Mueller’s team closely examined Trump’s public statements, whether uttered aloud to reporters or typed on Twitter, as part of its investigation into whether the president obstructed justice. In the report, Mueller’s team identified numerous instances in which Trump offered praise not only for Manafort but also his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and in some cases raised the possibility of a pardon as they faced prosecution on charges arising from Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
“With respect to Manafort,” Mueller’s team wrote, “there is evidence that the president’s actions had the potential to influence Manafort’s decision whether to cooperate with the government. The president and his personal counsel made repeated statements suggesting that a pardon was a possibility for Manafort, while also making it clear that the president did not want Manafort to ‘flip’ and cooperate with the government.”
Mueller ultimately declined to make a recommendation whether Trump tried to obstruct the Russia investigation. U.S. Attorney General William Barr, in concert with Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, said the evidence Mueller marshaled did not amount to obstruction.
“The results of the investigation are a total victory for the President ... it is clear there was no criminal wrongdoing,” Trump's defense lawyers said in a statement Thursday.
Mueller’s report highlighted, among other things, statements Trump made during Manafort’s trial in Alexandria, Virginia. Trump called the prosecution a “terrible situation” and “hoax” that “continues to stain our country.” Trump also described Manafort as a “Reagan/Dole darling” who had been “convicted of nothing” but was nonetheless “serving solitary confinement.”
According to Mueller's report:
“Some evidence supports a conclusion that the president intended, at least in part, to influence the jury. The trial generated widespread publicity, and as the jury began to deliberate, commentators suggested that an acquittal would add to pressure to end the special counsel’s investigation. By publicly stating on the second day of deliberations that Manafort ‘happens to be a very good person’ and that ‘it’s very sad what they’ve done to Paul Manafort’ right after calling the special counsel’s investigation a ‘rigged witch hunt,’ the president’s statements could, if they reached jurors, have the natural tendency to engender sympathy for Manafort among jurors, and a factfinder could infer that the president intended that result.”