Everyone knows what Robert Mueller was investigating. They know because on May 17, 2017, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein authorized the special counsel in a letter that provided for looking 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.” As many people have stated, that seems like a very broad writ, allowing Mueller’s team to address just about anything that came its way.
Only … that’s deceptive. Because that May 17 letter was not what defined Mueller’s authority. The real definition of the special counsel investigation came two and a half months later, on Aug. 2, when Rosenstein wrote a second memo to Mueller. That second memo states that the “May 17, 2017 order was worded categorically in order to permit its public release without confirming specific investigations involving specific individuals. This memorandum provides a more specific description of your authority. The following allegations were within the scope of the Investigation at the time of your appointment ...”
What follows is an enumerated list of exactly what Robert Mueller was allowed to investigate. We do not know what’s on that list.
In fact, we would not even be aware that the Aug. 2 memo existed, except for the fact that Mueller produced it in court to defend against charges from attorneys for Paul Manafort that the special counsel was overstepping the bounds of its scope. Because of that, we know the memo existed, and we know that it authorized the SCO to look at two things: allegations that Manafort committed a crime while colluding with the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 election, and allegations that Manafort committed crimes related to his work for the pro-Russian government in Ukraine.
The August memo ends with a statement that, if Mueller has any questions about his authority, he should check with Rosenstein. We do not know if this happened. We don’t even know if the August memo was the last redefinition of Mueller’s authority.
But we do know that some interesting things happened between the first memo and the second.
On July 20, 2017, Bloomberg reported that Mueller was expanding his investigation into “a broad range of transactions involving Trump’s businesses as well as those of his associates.” Reports indicated that the investigation was looking into a series of transactions in which Russian oligarchs were deeply involved in bailing Trump out of bankruptcy. This would take Mueller’s team directly into looking at why both Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump were bragging about the level of Russian investment in Trump’s properties, and examining Trump’s tight relationship with the the invisible funders behind the real estate development firm the Bayrock Group, and with Felix Sater, and probing how the Trump SoHo building came to be built on a stack of money funneled through LLCs.
The potential crimes committed by Trump in this period seem to match exactly with those committed by Paul Manafort. It’s clear that Trump lied to banks to obtain loans, overstating his wealth and exaggerating the value of assets. It also seems obvious that Trump was engaged in exactly the same kind of money laundering scheme as Manafort, a scheme in which he sold overvalued property to Russians, funneling payments through Cyprus-based LLCs. The oligarchs turned shady cash into genuine U.S. assets—apartments whose inflated sale prices allowed them to borrow more and allowed Trump to inflate the cost of other apartments—and they worked with Trump to set up additional shell companies inside the U.S.
All of that seemed to be on the table in July of 2017. However, that Bloomberg report came one day after a New York Times interview in which Trump declared a “red line" around his business assets, saying that for Mueller to look at his finances and his family’s finances would be a “breach of his actual charge.” As the Washington Post put it that same day, it seemed as if “someone” was “basically daring Trump to try to fire Mueller.”
The subject of Trump’s finances seemed to be at the forefront of the investigation for months. Long before WikiLeaks and Roger Stone took the stage, the investigation seemed to be surfacing characters like Sater and Sergei Millian and Andrii Artemenko. Who were connected with a long chain of businesses seemingly meant to hide the flow of mystery money into the Trump Organization.
Now, with the 300-page report from the special counsel in the hands of Attorney General William Barr, there seem to be three possibilities:
- There’s nothing in the report about Trump’s financial affairs because between the two letters, Rosenstein wrote Trump’s “red line” into Mueller’s instructions, taking those crimes outside his purview.
- Mueller chose to hand off the financial crimes to other jurisdictions, such as the the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, which could explain why that office offered partial immunity to Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg.
- There are lots of potential financial charges in the 300-page document provided by Mueller, but these were carefully omitted from the extremely narrow letter written by Barr.
But no matter which of these is true, the possibilities underscore the need to see not just the complete report produced by Mueller, but all the instructions provided to Mueller. Otherwise, it’s all too possible that he didn’t find something because he was told not to look.