Mueller said the report would contain “6(e)” material, meaning sensitive evidence and testimony gathered through grand jury subpoenas that by law could not be released publicly, and the special counsel’s office offered to help the Justice Department think through what would have to be redacted.
“My intent is to put as much out as possible, but I’m very concerned about the gap between when I get it and when I can put it out,” Barr said. “My goal is to put as much out as I can as quickly as I can, but I need your help with that.” He asked the special counsel’s team to identify as they finished drafting the report any 6(e) material in advance so it could be redacted in a timely fashion. The special counsel’s team agreed, and the meeting soon wrapped up.
In the days that followed, Barr, Rosenstein, and O’Callaghan chewed over Mueller’s decision not to decide. They could hardly understand Mueller and Quarles’s reasoning, and they thought, this is going to be a big mess. Barr concluded that he would decide whether the president criminally obstructed justice. The special counsel was under the auspices of the Justice Department, using the criminal process to obtain evidence, and Barr, Rosenstein, and O’Callaghan all believed firmly that the department must make the decision. There was no hesitation. The attorney general would make the call.
* * *
—
On Friday, March 15, at 7:41 a.m., Trump began a three-day Twitter spree in which he would post sixty-three missives by the end of the weekend. The Justice Department chiefs kept Trump and his lawyers in the dark, and in a series of tweets Trump wrote that Mueller “should never have been appointed and there should be no Mueller Report. This was an illegal & conflicted investigation in search of a crime. Russian Collusion was nothing more than an excuse by the Democrats for losing an Election that they thought they were going to win.”
Then came his conclusion: “THIS SHOULD NEVER HAPPEN TO A PRESIDENT AGAIN!”
Trump spent the weekend marooned at the White House rather than making his typical winter and spring weekend jaunt to Mar-a-Lago, and he stayed off the golf course, meaning he had little to keep himself occupied. He was triggered, at least in part, by a Politico article reporting that his advisers were building an early reelection strategy around “dignified settings like the Oval Office and the Rose Garden” rather than his “rambunctious rallies,” in part to make Trump appear more traditionally presidential. The story, written by Gabby Orr, was published on March 8, but Trump didn’t read it until an aide handed him a printout of it just before the March 15 weekend and provocatively inquired, “Sir, you are now going to be more presidential?”
Few media narratives got under Trump’s skin more than the impression that his staff was managing him, and whenever this happened, Trump found a way to prove that he could not be managed. He vented about it to Corey Lewandowski, one of his trusted outside political advisers. “These guys are going to tell me how to communicate?” Trump said. “They’re going to tell me when I’m going to do a rally and when I’m not?”
Twenty-four
THE REPORT
Around noon on March 22, an otherwise quiet Friday in spring, Ed O’Callaghan got a special delivery at his Justice Department office. He was handed a heavy ream of paper bound by a clear plastic sheet on top and a durable black backing. The title: “Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election.” Robert Mueller had completed his probe, and here were his long-awaited findings, all 448 pages of them.
O’Callaghan, Bill Barr, Rod Rosenstein, and Brian Rabbitt, Barr’s chief of staff, dropped their plans for the day, walled themselves off from others in the office, and started reading. Their first thought was that there were more than four hundred pages and Mueller’s team had not redacted anything. They instead used footnotes to mark sensitive material learned in the grand jury, but it wasn’t clear precisely what Mueller’s team felt should be kept secret. The special counsel’s team had indicated in the March 5 meeting that they would identify that sensitive information, known as 6(e) material, which could be a cumbersome process. But Mueller’s investigators did not feel it was their role to redact, only to identify the material. Justice Department officials saw this as a failure by Mueller’s team to redact as promised, and this critical missing step would make it difficult to release the report quickly to the public.
The Barr team’s immediate priority was to wrap their heads around what Mueller wrote, so they skipped around the two volumes looking for his conclusions and summaries. Midafternoon they decided they should notify the public that the special counsel had transmitted his report to the attorney general, so the team drafted a letter to Congress. Barr wrote, “I am reviewing the report and anticipate that I may be in a position to advise you of the Special Counsel’s principal conclusions as soon as this weekend.” He also reiterated his intention to make the findings public, adding, “I remain committed to as much transparency as possible.”
Between four and five o’clock that afternoon, Rabbitt called White House lawyer Emmet Flood to let him know that the Justice Department had the report. He read Flood a draft of Barr’s letter to congressional leaders but did not tell Flood what Mueller’s report said or what his bottom-line conclusions were. He telegraphed one bit of good news: Mueller was not recommending any additional indictments. Flood relayed the news to Trump. A few minutes later, Stephen Boyd, the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, hand delivered Barr’s letter to Capitol Hill, and it was almost immediately distributed to the news media. The world now knew that Mueller’s nearly two-year investigation was over, and his findings were in the hands of Barr.
Trump had already left for Florida that morning to spend the weekend at Mar-a-Lago. Flood and Pat Cipollone, believing that delivery of the Mueller report was imminent, accompanied him in case he needed lawyers close at hand and were added at the last minute to the Air Force One manifest for the 10:00 a.m. flight. But that Friday afternoon, the Trump team could do little but wait on Barr.
The president restrained himself from calling his attorney general to find out more, for once following his lawyers’ guidance about not communicating with Barr so as not to compromise the independence of the investigation. Trump’s team felt confident Mueller could not accuse Trump of any conspiracy to collude with Russians and was on shaky ground to accuse him of obstruction, based on the evidence they knew Mueller had compiled. They knew Mueller did not plan to indict Trump, a sitting president, and did not want to risk the negative political implications of preventing the Justice Department from making fully independent decisions. They knew the Democrats would want nothing more than to catch the president interfering with the end stage of the Mueller investigation.
In the weeks leading up to this moment, Barr had tried to maintain a healthy distance from Trump. He avoided too many visits to the White House for fear of appearing too chummy with the boss. But although Barr was new on the job, Trump and his team had full confidence in his judgment, in no small part because of Barr’s expansive view of presidential power and his June 2018 memo arguing that the obstruction of justice investigation into the president had been “fatally misconceived.” They also believed Barr had the will to fight to protect the president and his executive authority. Inside the White House, some aides nicknamed Barr “the Honey Badger,” a reference to a viral video in which a fearless badger climbs a tree to kill a snake, gets bitten by the snake, passes out, and then starts eating the slithering creature.