in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel), Trump tweets that his intelligence chiefs are “extremely passive,” “naive,” “wrong,” and need to “go back to school.”367
There is also evidence that Trump is assessing America’s strategic interests through the lens of his own personal enrichment. According to Time, during one briefing on the British Indian Ocean territory of Diego Garcia, “home to an important airbase and a U.S. Naval Support Facility … central to America’s ability to project power in the region, including in the war in Afghanistan,” the only questions Trump asked of his briefers were, “Are the people nice, and are the beaches good?”368 An official familiar with the briefing tells Time that “some of us wondered if he was thinking about … security issues … [or] thinking like a real estate developer.”369
One of the plotters identified by NBC is IP3 co-founder Bud McFarlane, who attended the VIP event orchestrated by Dimitri Simes prior to Trump’s Mayflower Hotel speech in April 2016.
Another connection between Trump and McFarlane is a now widely seen photograph of McFarlane entering Trump’s April 2016 Mayflower Hotel foreign policy speech alongside Sergey Kislyak. A video of the event shows the men as they return from the twenty-four-person VIP event that Trump held before the speech. McFarlane is, in both the photograph and video, carrying what appears to be a ceremonial Arabian sword—though it is unclear whether the sword is a gift that was given to him, a gift he has been asked to give to someone else, or is present at Trump’s first major foreign policy speech for some other, unknown reason.370
CHAPTER 11
THE MUELLER REPORT
April 2019 to June 2019
In April 2019, the DOJ releases a redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report. The report is missing any counterintelligence findings from federal law enforcement, all grand jury testimony compiled by the special counsel’s office, and all information about the fourteen criminal investigations referred to other jurisdictions by Mueller and his team. The report does, however, provide overwhelming evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Kremlin agents, even as it notes that it cannot establish beyond a reasonable doubt that the campaign conspired with the IRA or GRU in particular. A thousand former federal prosecutors of both parties opine in a public letter that the report proves that Trump obstructed justice—an impeachable offense.
On April 18, 2019, a redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report (the “Mueller Report”) is released to the public. All told, the Department of Justice has made 946 redactions from Mueller’s 448-page document, totaling approximately 8 percent of the report, according to CNN.1 Because most of the redactions are in the report’s first volume, a 198-page document that focuses on the possibility of a pre-election Trump-IRA or Trump-GRU conspiracy to commit computer crimes or defraud the United States—and because even the redactions in the second, obstruction-of-justice-focused volume of the report appear to be those items most relevant to the “conspiracy” question—approximately 15 percent of the information needed to understand the results of the special counsel’s conspiracy probe has been elided from the report. A separate analysis of the report by the Wall Street Journal concludes that 12 percent of the report has been redacted, meaning that nearly 20 percent of the material relevant to the special counsel’s conspiracy investigation has been removed.2 The report contains no counterintelligence findings, quotations from grand jury testimony, or evidence critical to ongoing federal investigations; it lacks, too, any information that President Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, deemed overly embarrassing to parties not charged with any crime.3 Though Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e) allows Barr to seek a court order to release all grand jury transcripts from the special counsel’s investigation, he declines to do so, implying under oath in May 2019 testimony before Congress that he believes—erroneously—that Rule 6(e) is a prohibition against publishing grand jury materials under any and all circumstances.4
Prior to the release of the Mueller Report, Barr had issued a four-page letter summarizing his view of the report’s conclusions and declaring that, in his estimation, President Trump had not committed obstruction of justice; he relies in part on his legal opinion that there can be no obstruction of justice without an underlying crime. It will later be revealed that Mueller sent a letter to the Department of Justice in response to Barr’s prefatory letter, complaining that the attorney general’s summary had failed to “capture the context, nature, and substance” of the special counsel office’s “work and conclusions,” and that