his aides, his allies, his advisers, and his associates with Russian government entities rather than with Russian nationals generally (or with nationals of other countries, whether in government service or not).23
While not finding sufficient evidence—in the evidence available to the special counsel’s office—to establish a criminal conspiracy beyond a reasonable doubt, the report does identify “a series of contacts between Trump Campaign officials and individuals with ties to the Russian government … [these] contacts consisted of business connections, offers of assistance to the Campaign, invitations for candidate Trump and Putin to meet in person, invitations for Campaign officials and representatives of the Russian government to meet, and [meetings on] policy positions seeking improved U.S.-Russian relations.”24 The report finds, too, that in June 2016, as the revelation of Russian hacking was becoming public, “the Campaign anticipated receiving information from Russia that could assist candidate Trump’s electoral prospects,” specifically in the form of “official documents and information that would incriminate” Clinton.25 Weeks later, shortly after WikiLeaks posted thousands of emails stolen from the DNC on its website, and just after “public reporting that U.S. intelligence agencies had ‘high confidence’ that the Russian government was behind the theft of emails and documents from the DNC,” candidate Trump publicly asked the Russian government to conduct further hacks to locate and publish any Clinton emails it could find. By July 31, 2016, these events, coupled with two more of great significance—Papadopoulos telling an Australian diplomat the Trump campaign knew the Kremlin had Clinton emails, and months of intelligence from seven allied intelligence agencies revealing previously unknown “contacts between Trump’s inner circle and Russians”—had led to an FBI investigation into “potential coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump Campaign.”26 The nations whose intelligence agencies the FBI relied upon in opening an investigation of the Trump campaign are France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Australia, Germany, Estonia, and Poland.27
Despite its narrow legal scope, the report implies that, while it did not find pre-election violations of conspiracy law in the Trump-Russia contacts it identified, it cannot say the same of the notion of “two parties [the Trump campaign and the Kremlin] taking actions that were informed by or responsive to the other’s actions or interests.”28 Consequently, the report is silent as to the commission, by members of the Trump campaign, of felonies that do not require a “tacit or express agreement”—which the federal conspiracy statute does—but instead can be violated when “two parties tak[e] actions … informed by or responsive to the other’s actions or interests,” such as in the federal bribery and aiding and abetting statutes.29
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As to allegations that Trump sought to thwart, through deceitful words and clandestine actions, any federal investigation of his, his family’s, and his associates’ pre-election ties to the Kremlin and Kremlin agents—as well as encouraging deceit, secrecy, and malfeasance by his subordinates—the Mueller Report concludes that “the evidence does point to a range of … possible personal motives animating the president’s conduct … [including] uncertainty about whether certain events … could be seen as criminal activity by the President, his campaign, or his family.”30 It adds that the special counsel considered not only “whether the President had a motive [to obstruct justice] related to Russia-related matters that an FBI field investigation could uncover” but also whether Trump was afraid of “other conduct that could come to light as a result of the FBI’s Russian-interference investigation,” including, but not limited to, revelations regarding pre-election “campaign-finance offenses”—a category that would include not only hush-money payments made to former mistresses but payments made illegally to Trump, or on Trump’s behalf, by foreign nations during the 2016 presidential campaign or presidential transition.31 Mueller concludes that “the evidence does indicate that a thorough FBI investigation would uncover facts about the campaign and the President personally that the President could have understood to be crimes or that would give rise to personal and political concerns.”32 The special counsel’s reference to “a thorough FBI investigation” seems to acknowledge that the Mueller Report is not, in itself, that investigation. As to other possible offenses Trump may have believed could be revealed as a result of the Russia investigation, Mueller notes that Trump felt the investigation was specifically hindering his ability to execute his preferred foreign policy in three locations around the world: Russia, China, and the Middle East.33
The Middle East may well have been of particular concern to the president during the week the special counsel was appointed. Trump’s references, in conversations with aides,