“Okay,” the president said, leaving no doubt to those around the dinner table that he was pissed.
The dinner-table discussion of Gallagher ended awkwardly, with a lull of silence before someone brought up a new topic. But Trump remained fixated on the case. In May, The New York Times would report that he was seriously considering pardons for Gallagher and several other U.S. military members accused of war crimes, a rare presidential intervention that experts warned could undermine military law.
In June, Gallagher would stand trial in a military courtroom in San Diego and on July 2 would be found not guilty of murdering the ISIS captive, although the military jury would convict him of posing for photos with the dead fighter’s body. The next day, Trump would celebrate the ruling and claim partial credit for the outcome with a Twitter message directed at the Gallagher family: “You have been through much together. Glad I could help!”
Trump would intercede once more on Gallagher’s behalf, ordering the navy to penalize the military lawyers who prosecuted the war crimes case against him. “The Prosecutors who lost the case against SEAL Eddie Gallagher (who I released from solitary confinement so he could fight his case properly), were ridiculously given a Navy Achievement Medal,” Trump would write July 31 on Twitter, adding that he had directed Richardson and Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer to “immediately withdraw and rescind the awards.”
The law permitted Trump to order the prosecutors be stripped of their medals, but there was little precedent for the move. Unlike the Medal of Honor, achievement medals are determined within the military and do not require a president’s endorsement. The presidential decree—made on Twitter no less—was yet another reminder for the Pentagon brass that Trump had no qualms about maximizing his power and intervening whenever he saw fit.
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The week of April 8, Washington was in a state of panicky anticipation for the release of Robert Mueller’s report. For the past couple of weeks, Justice Department officials had been carefully redacting portions of the 448-page document, but the public version was expected to drop imminently. Reporters were being told by their sources to be on standby.
Trump and his lawyers were being told the same. They had been wrestling with a major decision—whether to read the report before it became public. The normal answer for any attorney representing a client was a resounding yes. But Trump had to consider his lawyers’ fear that his critics could accuse him of getting the attorney general to redact portions that were particularly embarrassing to him before the document was publicly released.
“He could have said at any time, ‘I want to see the report.’ He didn’t do that,” one of the team members recalled about the president. “Everybody involved in that process was very concerned that Mueller’s report and the attorney general’s review and summary or release was viewed as being allowed to proceed without intervention. We wanted it to be clean. We didn’t want to give anyone an excuse to say we are sticking our fingers in.”
On the other hand, Trump’s legal team knew Mueller had delivered a monster of a document, which they jokingly called “a son of Starr report,” a reference to the 211-page document on Clinton investigations released in 1998 by independent counsel Kenneth Starr. The size of Mueller’s report made the Trump team anxious. The lawyers were expected to be prepared to respond to the report whenever it was released.
On April 11, Jane Raskin wrote a letter to Bill Barr explaining the Trump legal team’s belief that they had a right to read the report ahead of time. She cited the Justice Department’s policy that third parties who are not charged with a crime are entitled to ensure that their privacy and reputational interests are respected in Justice Department releases. She made clear that they merely wanted to read the document and did not intend to suggest any changes to it or request further redactions.
Barr agreed and told Jay Sekulow that his team should get ready to come over and read the report on April 15. But because the Justice Department’s final review took longer than expected, the Trump team’s review was pushed back a day. On the afternoon of April 16, Barr welcomed Sekulow, Rudy Giuliani, and Jane and Marty Raskin to his secure conference room on the sixth floor of the Justice Department’s headquarters to read Mueller’s work product.
The Trump team had developed a habit of reading their memos and correspondence aloud to one another to edit and refine the copy. So they decided they would try to read the Mueller report aloud. The scene became slightly comical. Marty Raskin was designated to read the first few pages of volume 1. But after reading a page, the team ditched the oral history reading.
“We’re like, ‘Forget it,’” recalled one team member. “It’s like you haven’t eaten for a week. Here’s a huge buffet in front of you. They give you amuse-bouche.”
The voracious lawyers began reading volume 1 but soon put it down. It didn’t implicate Trump. They quickly turned their focus to volume 2, which was a damning collection of evidence about Trump’s attempts to thwart the investigation. Though the scenes were unspooled in a gripping narrative, the legal analysis and explanations were difficult to follow.
“I had trouble getting through the first four pages,” said the team member. “It’s where they lay out why they aren’t going to reach a conclusion. The first dealt with the [Office of Legal Counsel] opinion. They recognized it was there and they were bound by it. They do an analysis of the opinion and whether they should even investigate this.”
The lawyers were stuck on the fourth page, reading it over and over again. This part dealt with Mueller’s justification for investigating Trump for two years even if he couldn’t prosecute him. It was a window into the special counsel’s strategy and legal reasoning. Mueller’s team explained that even reaching a decision about whether Trump had engaged in criminal conduct that would normally warrant prosecution would be as unfair as charging him, something they were prohibited from doing. The only fair solution, Mueller’s team wrote, was to document the evidence in a report that could be shared with the Justice Department and ultimately Congress.
But the president’s lawyers grew angry as they let this sink in. In their opinion, the report showed there was never any evidence that Trump engaged in an underlying crime, such as conspiring with Russians to interfere in the election, and so it was nearly impossible to conceive that he could be accused of obstructing a criminal probe. They thought, what was fair about investigating a president for the entirety of his presidency so far and then deciding not to determine whether the evidence amounted to a crime? The Trump lawyers firmly believed their client was innocent. His only “crime” was being a politician who felt shackled and slandered by being under investigation. As she read Mueller’s report, Jane Raskin thought, “This should never happen again.”
Mueller’s day of reckoning for the public turned out to be April 18. That morning, Barr, flanked by Rod Rosenstein and Ed O’Callaghan, strode to a lectern at the Justice Department’s press briefing room to hold a news conference moments before his office released the Mueller report to Congress and to the public. In his half an hour before the cameras, the attorney general said exactly what the president wanted to hear.