Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation’s final report is only getting closer. In the meantime, longtime journalist Carl Bernstein has shared what he’s garnered about the nature of that report from conversations with those in the know. During an appearance on CNN’s Reliable Sources this weekend, he shared with host Brian Stelter:
‘What we do know is that Donald Trump has tried to convince us that unless there’s some kind of smoking gun — a recording of him in the room with Putin saying, yes Vladimir, I’ll do your bidding — there’s been no collusion. That’s nonsense… he has done what appears to be Putin’s goals. He has helped Putin destabilize the United States and interfere in the election no matter whether it was purposeful or not, and that is part of what the draft of Mueller’s report I’m told is to be about.’
.@carlbernstein: “This is about the most serious counterintelligence people we have in the US government saying, ‘Oh my god, the President’s words and actions lead us to conclude that somehow he has become a witting, unwitting or half-witting pawn…to Vladimir Putin.’” pic.twitter.com/QOSdJPsJN5
— Reliable Sources (@ReliableSources) January 13, 2019
Mueller’s report has been rumored to be getting closer, a long time after the Trump team hoped the investigation would be over. For now, the investigation does remain active, as evidenced through means including Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn actively cooperating through at least March of this year.
Besides Flynn, Mueller’s team has already roped in former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, and others. Each one of them have lied about some key aspect of the Trump team’s relationship with Russia while the Kremlin has carried on with their destabilization campaign against the United States.
There are other key players in Trump’s inner circle who’ve done the same, although they haven’t been slapped with criminal charges yet. Donald Trump Jr., for instance, insisted at first that a meeting with a Kremlin lawyer meant to garner Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton was about adoptions. President Trump himself helped his son lie about that meeting in initial responses — and that doesn’t even touch on the lies Trump’s told himself about his own ties to Russia. He’s said over and over that he has nothing to do with the country, but the threads just keep popping up over and over. His company was going to put up a Trump Tower Moscow that Putin was going to get a penthouse in!
Bernstein suggested that many of the Trump team’s lies could be traced to these business interests, and noted that the level to which the reasoning intersected with Russia’s own reasoning for their destabilization efforts would be explored in the Mueller report. In other words, as he put it, the question would be answered of whether Trump was a witting, unwitting, or even half-witting pawn of the Russians — although there’s little question that he has acted as a pawn at this point.
Just this past week, The New York Times reported that the FBI opened a fact finding counterintelligence investigation into Trump in the days after he abruptly fired FBI Director James Comey in 2017. The move was unprecedented, and as Bernstein noted, not the action of some “deep state” operatives but instead, the work of “the most serious counterintelligence people we have in the U.S. government.”
Their efforts were eventually absorbed into the Mueller probe alongside the question of whether the president should be held criminally liable for obstruction of justice.
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