interfere in the 2016 election … [were] discussed extensively” with Trump, and that after the briefing Trump had “all the information … need[ed] to be crystal clear” on the Kremlin’s responsibility for attacks on the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign.2 Specifically, Trump was shown “classified materials … [establishing] ‘direct links’ between Vladimir Putin’s government and the recent hacks and e-mail leaks.”3 According to Fox News, the hours-long briefing also lays out, more broadly, “threats to the United States and other security issues.” The night of the briefing, Trump is asked if he trusts the intelligence he’s just received; he responds, “Not so much from the people that have been doing it for our country.”4
Whatever Trump’s views on trusting U.S. intelligence services versus foreign intelligence services, or advice from his own national security advisers versus advice from his designated intelligence briefers, Trump’s August 17 briefing activates a legal trigger under 18 U.S.C. § 2, the federal aiding and abetting statute, as post-briefing Trump has what the law considers “foreknowledge” of the legal elements of Russia’s computer crimes.5 This means that Trump cannot, at any time after August 17, “knowingly” engage in any act, verbal or physical, that would “induce” either the continuation of Russian crimes against the United States or any new crimes that are both related to their predecessors and foreseeable to Trump following the briefing.6 Trump’s legally discernible “foreknowledge” is, shortly after August 17, augmented by a second classified intelligence briefing at which he—and possibly, again, Flynn and Christie, as the “candidate is allowed to choose two people to bring with them to the briefing”—“receive[s] additional briefings on the Russian hack.”7
The degree of specificity in Trump’s first two classified national security briefings is significant. According to CNN, during the first of these briefings Trump is “personally warned … that foreign adversaries—including Russia—would likely attempt to infiltrate his team or gather intelligence about his campaign.”8 Moreover, not only does Trump have Russia’s election interference activities explained to him in detail, but his briefers also explain to him “potential activities by China”—meaning that Trump’s briefing distinguishes between Russian and Chinese threats with respect to both Trump’s own campaign and attacks on the nation’s elections infrastructure.9 Finally, according to CNN law enforcement analyst Josh Campbell, formerly a supervisory special agent for the national security and criminal divisions of the FBI, at his two late-summer briefings Trump would have been “told to reach out to the FBI if they [he or anyone on his team] sensed anything suspicious.”10
Despite these warnings and requests regarding Kremlin attempts to “infiltrate” his campaign—an infiltration Trump knew had already occurred on several fronts, including, for instance, in his aide George Papadopoulos’s confession to being a Kremlin “intermediary” on March 31, 2016—there is no evidence that Trump passed any information to the U.S. intelligence community about what he and his campaign had already observed firsthand. Under the circumstances, his answers to any FBI queries on this score may have constituted an abetting of Russian crimes as well as an offense under 18 U.S.C § 1001, which prohibits making false statements to federal law enforcement officers.11
Despite Trump passing a legal watershed on August 17, after his classified briefings he does the following: (1) professes, at two 2016 presidential debates, to have no knowledge of whether Russia has attacked or is attacking the United States; (2) falsely declares, in May 2018, that “the FBI never warned his campaign that Russians might try to infiltrate his team”; and (3) continues to deny, well into 2017, Russian involvement in election interference. Trump’s recalcitrance stands in the face of a July 26, 2016, New York Times article reporting that U.S. intelligence agencies “now have ‘high confidence’ that the Russian government was behind the theft of emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee”; Trump’s August 17 briefing and its follow-up; an October 7 public statement by U.S. intelligence officials confirming that “Russia’s senior-most officials … directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions”; a December 10 report that “U.S. intelligence agencies had ‘concluded that Russia interfered in … [the] presidential election to boost Donald Trump’s bid for the White House”; and a January 6, 2017, classified briefing that unfolded for Trump the entirety of the intelligence community’s evidence against the Kremlin’s hackers and propagandists.12 Moreover, as the Mueller Report will note, six weeks before the July 26 New York Times article revealing the U.S. intelligence community’s “high confidence” assessment on Russian election hacking, the “cybersecurity firm that had conducted