Barr reinforced Trump’s talking points that the report had found “no collusion,” even though, as the report stated, “collusion” was not a term in federal criminal law. He also tried to spin volume 2 as less damaging for the president than many other readers of the evidence would argue, and he even offered a defense, or at least a sympathetic explanation, for Trump’s potentially obstructive acts.
“President Trump faced an unprecedented situation,” Barr told reporters. “As he entered into office, and sought to perform his responsibilities as President, federal agents and prosecutors were scrutinizing his conduct before and after taking office, and the conduct of some of his associates. At the same time, there was relentless speculation in the news media about the President’s personal culpability. Yet, as he said from the beginning, there was in fact no collusion. And as the Special Counsel’s report acknowledges, there is substantial evidence to show that the President was frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents, and fueled by illegal leaks.”
An array of former federal prosecutors and Democratic lawmakers denounced Barr’s performance as a partisan farce and castigated him as a henchman. He was accused of serving as Trump’s defense counsel, not as the nation’s attorney general. But one person cheering him on was the president.
“I love this guy,” Trump told Chris Christie about Barr’s handling of the Mueller report. “He’s a warrior.”
Trump was thrilled with the report’s conclusions and with Barr’s protective moves but was furious with the news coverage of the report’s most derogatory scenes. Many of them were attributed in the footnotes to Don McGahn or to the notes kept by the then White House counsel’s chief of staff, Annie Donaldson.
Donaldson’s notes, scribbled rapidly on a legal pad, were the closest thing the Trump White House had to the Nixon tapes: a sort of diary guiding Mueller’s prosecutors through months of West Wing chaos and chronicling Trump’s attempts to blunt the investigation. Her words were unflinching and even humorous. “Just in the middle of another Russia Fiasco,” she wrote on March 2, 2017. In another entry, on March 21, 2017, Donaldson wrote of Trump, “beside himself” and “getting hotter and hotter.”
The morning of April 19, Trump was at Mar-a-Lago for the Easter weekend and was stewing over media coverage. Trump, who had long been suspicious of paper trails, tweeted, “Statements are made about me by certain people in the Crazy Mueller Report, in itself written by 18 Angry Democrat Trump Haters, which are fabricated & totally untrue. Watch out for people that take so-called ‘notes,’ when the notes never existed until needed.”
Trump seethed in particular over McGahn’s extensive cooperation with Mueller, which was clear given his ubiquity in the report’s sourcing. Giuliani attacked McGahn in a series of media interviews and argued that the White House counsel should have resigned if he thought what Trump was doing violated the law.
Other Trump advisers said they believed McGahn was being singled out unfairly by some in Trump’s orbit because of his past tensions with key figures, including Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. One of these advisers told Robert Costa of The Washington Post, “If anything, Don saved this presidency from the president. If Don had actually gone through with what the president wanted, you would have had a constitutional crisis. The president’s ego is hurt, but he’s still here.”
Trump escaped, at least for now, the justice so many legal professionals believed he deserved. In May, more than a thousand former federal prosecutors who served under both Republican and Democratic administrations signed an open letter stating that Trump’s conduct as documented in Mueller’s report “would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.”
Yet in the summer months that followed, Democrats in the House would fail to generate sufficient momentum to begin impeachment proceedings based on the Russia probe. The White House counsel’s office would block their requests for records and testimony from scores of current and former Trump advisers under claims of executive privilege. More Democratic legislators would slowly speak out in favor of impeachment, but the fall would arrive without any meaningful congressional action in response to the devastating evidence the special counsel uncovered.
If Mueller believed Congress ought to pursue impeachment, he did almost nothing to help achieve that outcome. By refusing to answer questions about his findings until his July 24 House testimony, by offering up a 448-page report and expecting the public or even members of Congress would have the attention span to absorb its lawyerly analysis, Mueller fumbled the moment. He was too pure and too invested in the norms of an institution of yore, the Justice Department, whose core values and the public servants who upheld them had been under assault for two straight years.
“His silence, his telling people to just read the report, has allowed a guy like Trump and a disappointing guy like Barr to come in, and Barr knows Mueller and he knows that Mueller won’t fight back,” said Frank Figliuzzi, the former Mueller FBI colleague. The special counsel, he concluded, “ended up getting played. But I don’t mean that he should’ve done something different because it might turn out that history will look at Mueller and say the guy brought faith and credibility back to institutions and Barr and Trump could be dismissed by history. We don’t know where this is going. But in the moment, it looks like he was suckered and he lost the fight.”
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On June 18, it was ninety degrees, humid, and hazy in Orlando. Just sixteen miles down the road from Disney World, citizens of MAGA nation converged at the Amway Center early in the morning to obtain spots in the security line. People adorned themselves with “Make America Great Again” caps and red, white, and blue boas. They parked themselves under the shade of camping tents or in folding chairs, wheeled up coolers with beverages, and waited patiently for the superstar to arrive.
That night, Trump swooped in to officially launch his reelection campaign. As he was aboard Air Force One en route to central Florida, the capacity crowd of roughly twenty thousand inside the Amway Center was rapturous. Paula White, a pastor and televangelist who said she had a nearly two-decade relationship with the Trump family, delivered the opening prayer.
“I come to you in the name of Jesus,” White told the crowd. Quoting from scripture, she said, “We’re not wrestling against flesh and blood, but against principalities, powers, against rulers of darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. So right now let every demonic network that has aligned itself against the purpose, against the calling of President Trump, let it be broken, let it be torn down in the name of Jesus, let the counsel of the wicked be spoiled right now. According to Job 12:17, I declare that President Trump will overcome every strategy from hell and every strategy from the enemy—every strategy—and he will fulfill his calling and his destiny.”