Zachary Fryer-Biggs | Vox

Mueller’s questions show that he wants to get Trump to incriminate himself

2018-05-01T17:19:47-04:00

Robert Mueller testifies during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on June 19, 2013. | Alex Wong/Getty Images

Special counsel Robert Mueller is trying to negotiate a sit-down interview with President Trump. If he gets it, we now have a clearer sense of what the former FBI director wants to talk about: the numerous instances in which it appears that Trump might have tried to obstruct justice.

On Monday night, the New York Times published a report with the questions Mueller’s staff told Trump’s lawyers they want to ask. The questions range from what Trump was thinking when he fired former FBI Director James Comey, who was leading an investigation into possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, to what he knew about former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the US.

Legal experts told me the questions seem focused on “criminal intent.” Mueller is reportedly investigating Trump for potential obstruction of justice as part of his Russia probe, but that requires first showing that the president was intentionally trying to impede the investigation.

The hope for Mueller is that Trump says things that make Mueller’s case for him, even accidentally. That could include Trump saying that he fired Comey to disrupt the Russia investigation, or that he knew Flynn had lied to federal agents and wanted Comey to not prosecute Flynn.

“He might blurt out something that he doesn’t realize is incriminating because he doesn’t understand the nature of his potential criminal liability,” Jens David Ohlin, a professor at Cornell Law School, told me.

That seems like a fair bet: Trump reacted to the New York Times article on Tuesday morning with a tweet that made clear he had little idea what obstruction of justice actually was.

“It would seem very hard to obstruct justice for a crime that never happened!” he wrote.

It would seem very hard to obstruct justice for a crime that never happened! Witch Hunt!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 1, 2018

That’s flatly wrong. Obstruction of justice involves interfering with an investigation, regardless of whether the investigation uncovers a crime.

Prosecutors can prove intent to obstruct justice without a direct confession using things like documents or interviews with witnesses who can help demonstrate what a suspect was thinking at a given moment. But Mueller’s questions show that he at least wants a shot at getting Trump to address the intent question himself.

The stakes couldn’t be higher: If Trump admits under oath that he fired Comey to end the Russia investigation, as the president suggested during a May 2017 interview with NBC, it could help Mueller prove Trump obstructed justice. And even if Trump is never charged by Mueller, proof of obstruction could haunt the rest of his presidency and even serve as the backbone of articles of impeachment.

Mueller’s questions are designed to force Trump to explain the reasoning behind his actions

Trump’s legal team and Mueller’s office have been negotiating for months over the terms of a potential interview. Trump’s former personal lawyer John Dowd insisted on getting questions in advance to decide whether an interview was a good idea. Mueller’s team read Trump’s lawyers a list of questions in March, according to the New York Times.

Trump still wanted to do the interview, but Dowd saw the questions as a setup, and decided to quit, according to the report. Dowd left the legal team later in March.

The questions the Times published are based on notes taken by Trump’s lawyers during their conversation with the Mueller team. Trump called the disclosure of the questions to the paper “disgraceful” in a tweet Tuesday.

The questions focus primarily on the firing of Flynn and of Comey.

Flynn discussed US sanctions with Sergey Kislyak, then the Russian ambassador to the US, after Trump won the election but before he took office. Flynn lied to federal investigators about the call, a crime he pleaded guilty to in December of last year.

According to Comey, Trump told him that he hoped Comey would “let [Flynn] go” during a February 14, 2017, meeting. If Trump knew that Flynn had committed a crime when he made his statement to Comey, and was hoping to make the charges go away by talking to Comey, that would appear to be obstruction of justice.

Several of Mueller’s questions involve what Trump knew about Flynn’s calls with Kislyak, and what he said to Comey about Flynn.

“What was the purpose of your Feb. 14, 2017, meeting with Mr. Comey, and what was said?” one question reads.

Most of the questions are broad and look at what Trump was thinking, as opposed to specific factual questions.

“These are open-ended questions, in response to which investigators would of course like to hear the president’s on-the-record explanation,” Lisa Kern Griffin, a professor at Duke University School of Law, told me.

Griffin said she thinks it’s unlikely that investigators “actually expect to get answers.”

“It would be disastrous for the president to submit to any interview in which he has potential liability for lying,” she said.

There’s a tantalizing and mysterious Russia-related question

Although most of the questions focus on Comey and Flynn, some do delve into possible collusion between Trump aides and Russian operatives. One question in particular suggests that Mueller has information on communication between the Trump campaign and Russia that hasn’t previously been reported.

“What knowledge did you have of any outreach by your campaign, including by Paul Manafort, to Russia about potential assistance to the campaign?” one question asks.

Mueller indicted the former Trump campaign chair on a range of financial crimes in October, and Manafort had contact with at least one man who Mueller says was a Russian operative, according to court documents. Until now, though, there have been no reports that Manafort directly requested assistance for the campaign from Russia.

Even if Trump’s legal team wasn’t aware of the request for help by Manafort, Ric Simmons, a law professor at Ohio State University, told me that including it in an advance list of questions wouldn’t pose much of a risk for Mueller.

“Mueller already has some evidence, and he already has numerous cooperating witnesses,” Simmons said.

There are other questions that could be tied to collusion, according to Vox’s Andrew Prokop:

Several questions on the list published by the New York Times on Monday evening are quite obviously about potential collusion. Mueller wants to ask Trump what he knew about Russian hacking and social media interference during the campaign, [and] the Trump Tower meeting with a Kremlin-tied lawyer.

It’s still unclear whether Trump would sit for an interview. White House counsel Ty Cobb said last month that Trump still wants to do it, and Trump’s new personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani met with Mueller’s team last week to continue negotiations about the precise terms of what would be a historic encounter.

If the meeting does end up taking place, we’ll all have a much better sense of what to expect from the end of Mueller’s investigation.

Manafort just lost a case that would have undermined Mueller’s probe

2018-04-27T14:59:34-04:00

Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort leaves a courthouse following a hearing on April 4, 2018. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort tried to use a civil case to block criminal charges special counsel Robert Mueller filed against him as part of his Russia probe. Manafort failed miserably.

On Friday, a federal judge dismissed a long-shot civil lawsuit that Manafort had filed in January. This means that Mueller, who is leading the probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, retains his broad power to investigate any potential crimes he uncovers during his investigation.

The case was widely seen as an attempt by Manafort to avoid the 44 charges he is facing tied to alleged money laundering and tax crimes. So unless he reaches a deal with prosecutors, Manafort will have to face trial on charges that could put him in jail for a combined 305 years.

Manafort, who ran Donald Trump’s campaign for three months during the summer of 2016, is the highest-ranking official from the Trump campaign to be indicted by Mueller. Mueller initially brought extensive charges against Rick Gates, Manafort’s longtime business partner, but Gates struck a plea deal with the special counsel in February.

Manafort’s original civil lawsuit argued that Mueller had gone beyond his mandate as special counsel in bringing the charges since none are directly tied to the what Mueller is investigating: the 2016 presidential election and Russian interference. Manafort’s legal team wanted Mueller’s charges against Manafort blocked and a court order preventing him from bringing other non-election related charges.

That led to Mueller revealing on April 2 a redacted version of his mandate, which Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein signed, in a court filing.

Rosenstein expressly told Mueller to look at Manafort’s business and financial dealings, including “payments he received” as part of his past work for the Ukrainian government.

In response, Manafort’s legal team changed their argument, instead saying Rosenstein had exceeded his authority by giving Mueller permission to look into “any matters that arose or may arise directly” from their investigation.

The federal judge, Amy Berman Jackson, voiced deep skepticism about the new strategy when Manafort’s lawyers unveiled it.

“I don’t really understand what is left of your case,” she said during an April 4 hearing.

Manafort will now have to face extensive criminal charges

On Friday, Berman Jackson followed through on this sentiment and dismissed the case, saying that after Manafort’s lawyers changed what they were asking for “it is not at all clear that there is any … controversy left in the lawsuit for the Court to resolve.”

Berman Jackson is also overseeing one of the criminal cases against Manafort and is the judge who sentenced Manafort associate Alexander van der Zwaan to 30 days in prison for lying to federal investigators. Van der Zwaan lied about contact with a man who Mueller’s team says works with Russian intelligence groups.

Thus far, Mueller has reached deals with all of the Trump associates he’s indicted, with the exception of Manafort. The others have traded cooperation with his investigation and built cases against increasingly senior figures for reduced charges.

If Manafort flips, he would place Mueller at the very top of the Trump campaign hierarchy and put him inside Trump’s inner circle. That could potentially be critical for Mueller’s investigation, as Manafort was part of major Trump campaign decisions and would almost certainly be aware of any collusion with Russia.

With his civil case dismissed, Trump’s former campaign chair is potentially looking at a lifetime in jail as he contemplates cooperating with Mueller. For Manafort, the stakes have never been higher.

Read: House Russia investigation final report

2018-04-27T14:29:59-04:00

Rep. Mike Conaway (R-TX), who led the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation, appears on Meet the Press Sunday, March 18, 2018. | William B. Plowman/NBC/NBC NewsWire via Getty Images

The House Intelligence Committee just released its final report on Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election, saying that the Trump campaign did not collude with Russia, and blaming US intelligence agencies for “tradecraft failings.”

The 253 page report, which had been heavily redacted, says the Trump campaign made a series of “imprudent,” “ill-advised,” and “questionable” decisions in holding meetings with Kremlin-linked people and trying to make contact with WikiLeaks, but concluded that the investigation didn’t uncover any criminality.

Democrats on the committee slammed the report, saying that Republicans hadn’t actually been looking for collusion or potential crimes.

“Throughout the investigation, Committee Republicans chose not to seriously investigate — or even see, when in plain sight — evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the ranking Democrat on the committee, said in an emailed statement.

Republican leadership of the committee released the highly contentious report a month after issuing a summary on March 22 that set off a partisan fight over Russian goals during the election.

Republicans initially argued that US intelligence agencies were wrong in their report published in January 2017 that said Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted then-GOP nominee Donald Trump to win and tried to sway the election in his favor. Facing a wave of criticism, several house Republicans backtracked shortly afterward.

The final House Intelligence Committee report is consistent with that previous argument, saying that the US intelligence agencies’ conclusion wasn’t well-reasoned.

The document also largely backed other reports on Russian efforts to shape the election, supporting a New York Times article that said the investigation into the Trump campaign started because of George Papadopoulos.

You can read the entire report here.

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Trump is trying to send a US citizen to Saudi Arabia without a trial

2018-04-26T16:58:31-04:00

President Donald Trump speaks beside US Secretary of Defense James Mattis (C) during a meeting with members of his Cabinet on March 8, 2018. | Michael Reynolds-Pool/Getty Images

The Trump administration is trying to ship an American citizen with alleged links to ISIS to Saudi Arabia without a trial — and without any assurances that he won’t simply be thrown into prison once he arrives on Saudi territory.

The proposed move has no recent precedent and highlights President Trump’s willingness to veer outside of established legal practice as part of his hardline strategy for fighting Washington’s long-running war on terror.

The legal drama will come to a head Friday, when a federal appeals court will hear the Trump administration’s case for proceeding with the prisoner transfer. Earlier this month, a federal judge temporarily blocked the administration from sending the unnamed prisoner to Saudi Arabia because the government had “failed to provide” a persuasive argument for moving ahead with it. Now, the White House is trying again — and could make a grim kind of history if it gets its way.

“We are not aware of any case in American history where the government has tried to send away an American citizen,” Brett Kaufman a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, which is defending the detainee, told me.

The Pentagon directed my request for comment to the Department of Justice, which did not respond.

The US government has never revealed the name of the citizen in question, who turned himself in to US-allied fighters in Syria. All court documents identify him as John Doe. The Justice Department has gone to extraordinary lengths to redact all legal filings and continues to argue that making details of the case public could “undermine” US diplomacy.

But the court battle continues, with the man sitting in a jail cell in Iraq while the Trump administration tries to find a way to exile him to Saudi Arabia.

The case has some echoes of President George W. Bush’s so-called “extraordinary rendition” program, in which CIA operatives sent terror suspects to 54 countries, several of which later tortured the prisoners.

But the new case has a key difference: It appears to be the first time in recent history that the government has tried to ship an American citizen overseas against their will and without any trial. If the administration prevails in court, the practice could easily be repeated in the fight against terrorism.

“If the government can hold him for seven and a half months and counting without a preliminary hearing, what’s to say they can’t hold any of us?” Steve Vladeck, a professor specializing in national security law at the University of Texas School of Law, said.

The Trump administration is working hard to keep this case secret

Despite government efforts to keep details of the case secret, redacted court documents describe a seven-month legal battle after the man surrendered to US-allied Syrian Democratic Forces at a checkpoint near the border with Turkey in September of last year.

In addition to having US citizenship, John Doe is also a citizen of Saudi Arabia — where the US government wants to send him, according to news reports and an accidental disclosure in a court document. John Doe says he was in Syria to “report” on ISIS, not help the terrorist organization, according to court filings.

The US government is claiming that it can send the man to an unnamed country, with the accidental disclosure revealing it’s Saudi Arabia, without a trial because that country has a “sovereign interest” in the man.

The problem is that Saudi Arabia’s criminal justice system has a dismal human rights record. It routinely sentences convicted criminals to capital punishments ranging from lashings to beheadings, and many defendants don’t even get lawyers.

That may explain why the US government has made sure to avoid mentioning the words “Saudi Arabia” in public or in any court documents. We know that’s the country in question because someone redacting details of the case for an April 18 court filing messed up and left a single reference to the “Saudi legal” system in place. An updated version of the document filed hours after the original corrected the error, but by that point, it had been seen and shared widely.

That confirmed media reports that the detainee was a dual US-Saudi citizen, and that Washington was trying to send him to Saudi Arabia.

The ACLU says the US government should have to prove that the man committed a crime before it can extradite him to Saudi Arabia.

Doe asked to speak with Americans when he surrendered last year, and Syrian Democratic Forces handed him over to the US military, who took him to a military prison in Iraq. He currently remains there in detention.

From the beginning, government lawyers have insisted that the man was a member of ISIS, and thus no longer has the same legal protections US citizens enjoy. They’ve labeled him an “enemy combatant,” the legal term used by the Bush administration to justify avoiding trials during the early years of the post-9/11 war on terror.

The label basically means that the person in question is fighting for an armed group but isn’t part of a recognized army, and so isn’t protected by international law like the Geneva Convention.

After several reports that the military had a US citizen in custody, the ACLU stepped in last year and began a court battle to push for some kind of trial for the man. They haven’t been successful so far. In January, however, a federal judge ruled that the military had to provide 72 hours’ notice before it shipped the detainee to any other country.

The Pentagon insisted that it shouldn’t have to give the court notice of a transfer, and requested that two unnamed countries be exempt from the 72-hour rule. The judge denied that request, and on April 17, the Justice Department lawyers filed paperwork saying that they planned to extradite the man, with all mention of Saudi Arabia redacted.

John Doe’s case is historic, and not in a good way

Doe is the third American civilian held by the US military since 9/11, according to Vladeck, the national security law expert. The government transferred José Padilla to the civilian justice system and he was sentenced in 2007 to more than 20 years in prison for supporting al-Qaeda. Another American citizen, Yaser Hamdi, agreed to a deal to move to Saudi Arabia in 2004 after spending three years in military custody for allegedly fighting with the Taliban.

If the Trump administration is successful, John Doe would be the first US citizen in modern history sent overseas without a trial.

“A lot of people are familiar with extradition,” Kaufman told me. “The oddity of this case is that no one has charged our client with a crime.”

Vladeck said the administration’s legal argument could set a “dangerous precedent” because the government could easily use the same logic for any US citizen thought to support terrorism. That would mean that the government could rely on extradition as a tactic with terror suspects who have dual citizenship to avoid civilian courts.

Either way, the case says a lot about how the administration wants to wage its fight against ISIS and terrorism more broadly. Trump’s officials are willing to do whatever it takes to dispose of people they believe are terrorists, even at the expense of making it easier for future administrations to do something that once would have been unthinkable.

Trump tells Fox & Friends he’s leaving the Russia probe alone … for now

2018-04-26T10:52:44-04:00

President Donald Trump speaks reporters during a meeting with President Emmanuel Macron of France on April 24, 2018. | Chris Kleponis-Pool/Getty Images

President Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked the Justice Department, accusing top officials of going “crazy” and calling the ongoing Russia investigation a “witch hunt.” He’s toyed with firing the investigation’s head, special counsel Robert Mueller, telling reporters “we’ll see what happens.”

But on Thursday morning, the president called in to his favorite TV show, Fox & Friends, and said he’s not going to interfere with Mueller’s work — at least for the moment.

“I have decided that I won’t be involved,” Trump said. “I may change my mind at some point because what’s going on is a disgrace.”

The interview, which went on for half an hour, also covered Trump’s thoughts on the ongoing legal battle surrounding the FBI raid on Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen. Cohen is fighting a federal prosecutor in New York over which documents the FBI can review from the raid, which grew out of an investigation into Cohen’s $130,000 payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels in exchange for her silence about an alleged affair she had with Trump in 2006. The Justice Department is reportedly investigating whether that payment may have violated campaign finance and banking laws.

Trump said he had “nothing to do” with Cohen’s personal businesses, claiming that the Cohen investigation is about Cohen’s business holdings. “I’m not involved, and I’ve been told I’m not involved,” Trump said.

Yet this directly contradicts what his own lawyer has said in court. Trump hired an attorney, Joanna Hendon, shortly after the raid. During a hearing on April 13, Hendon told a federal judge that Trump has “an acute interest in this matter.”

So in two major parts of the Fox interview, on Mueller and on Cohen, Trump’s comments clash with what he’s said and done in the past. Between the Cohen case and the ongoing negotiations with Mueller over a potential interview for the Russia investigation with Trump himself, Trump is facing legal battles on all sides.

But there’s a flip side to this. If Trump’s comments aren’t always a good guide to his actions, then his comments about the Justice Department are no guarantee that he won’t interfere with the Russia investigation in the future. Indeed, Trump openly admitted as much in the interview.

So it may seem, after this interview, like Mueller has a little more time to try to build his case. But it’s hard to be sure.

How the Kremlin may have helped Trump win the Catholic vote

2018-04-24T19:06:38-04:00

Then-GOP nominee Donald Trump delivers a speech on October 12, 2016, in which he attacked his opponent Hillary Clinton’s campaign for stolen emails released by WikiLeaks. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images

On April 11, 2011, a trio of prominent Catholic Democratic operatives traded a series of emails accusing Republicans of cherry-picking aspects of their religion for political gain.

“It’s an amazing bastardization of the faith,” wrote John Halpin of the liberal Center for American Progress think tank.

“I imagine they think it is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion,” Jennifer Palmieri, who also worked for CAP at the time, replied. “Their rich friends wouldn’t understand if they became evangelicals.”

Nothing about the email exchange was particularly remarkable, except for the third person copied in: John Podesta, the head of CAP and a former White House chief of staff.

That became a serious problem five years later, when Podesta was running Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Russian hackers broke into Podesta’s email account and passed thousands of messages to WikiLeaks to try to damage Clinton and help then-GOP nominee Donald Trump.

On October 11, 2016, WikiLeaks released the Halpin-Palmieri emails. Within hours, Russia’s state-owned RT media outlet started highlighting the exchange in an array of articles on its website that quoted the emails extensively and said that they included “disparaging comments.”

Trump, reeling from the release of the Access Hollywood tape only four days earlier, jumped at the chance to attack Clinton’s team.

His first attack came on the evening of October 11, the same day WikiLeaks released the emails. At a campaign rally in Florida, Trump said the emails showed “the Clinton Team attacking Catholics.”

He went further the next day, telling another rally that the emails “show members of the Clinton team viciously attacking Catholics and Evangelicals.” The messages, he added, “could be election changing.”

We’ll never definitively know whether this WikiLeaks email dump, or their continued release of sensitive emails stolen from Podesta and the Democratic National Committee, were what allowed Trump to squeeze out his razor-thin victory.

But the story of the leaked Halpin-Palmieri-Podesta emails about Catholicism is important all the same because it illustrates the sophistication with which WikiLeaks released the stolen emails for maximum political effect — and the speed with which the emails ricocheted through the conservative media ecosystem and then into Trump’s own remarks.

Put another way, this specific case illustrates a broader point about WikiLeaks: The stolen emails had power, and Trump and his allies so badly wanted to use that power to win the White House that they tried to get early access to the stolen emails at least six times before WikiLeaks publicly released them. And that, in turn, is why special counsel Robert Mueller is focusing on the stolen emails as part of his investigation into Russia-Trump collusion.

This is why Trump was desperate to win the Catholic vote

Spending substantial time on the Catholic vote might seem like a waste, until you look at the demographics of several key battleground states.

Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, two states Trump was aggressively contesting, are among the top 10 states in the US in terms of Catholic population at 29 percent and 32 percent respectively, according to a Gallup survey from 2014.

That means there are about 3.7 million Catholics in Pennsylvania, a state that Trump won by fewer than 50,000 votes. There are about 1.8 million Catholics in Wisconsin, a state he won by about 20,000 votes. Both states were critical to his narrow Electoral College victory.

“It was absolutely part of the strategy to focus on blue-collar Catholics in the Rust Belt; it was a major initiative of the Trump campaign,” Stephen Schneck, a professor at the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies, told me. “WikiLeaks was clearly a piece of all that.”

Polls showed Trump had been lagging among Catholics all through the summer of 2016. An August 2016 poll by PRRI, a polling company that focuses on religion in politics, had Trump trailing Clinton by 23 percent among Catholic registered voters. Four years earlier, Obama and then-GOP nominee Mitt Romney were effectively tied with that group even though many Catholics hold unfavorable views of Mormonism, Romney’s faith.

“You saw people having reservations [about Trump],” Robert Jones, CEO of PRRI, told me, noting that Trump had been sharply critical of Pope Francis and had a well-known history of infidelity.

And by the time WikiLeaks released the emails, Trump was also trying to manage the fallout from the Access Hollywood tape, in which he’s recorded boasting about sexual assault. An influential Catholic political group, Catholic Vote, called for Trump to step down shortly after the tape surfaced.

“If Donald Trump is unwilling to step aside, the Republican National Committee must act soon out of basic decency and self-preservation,” the organization said in a press release.

Then WikiLeaks released the emails.

The stolen emails were a gift for Donald Trump

The sudden uproar over emails that were five years old at that point baffled the three participants.

“We’re calling out rich and right-wing hypocrites that are using our faith to do things that we think are antithetical to our faith,” Halpin, who supported Bernie Sanders and is still with CAP, told me. “At a minimum, it had absolutely nothing to do with Hillary Clinton.”

But with Podesta then running Clinton’s campaign and Palmieri serving as her communications director, Trump’s surrogates jumped at the chance to paint Clinton as anti-Catholic.

The campaign immediately organized a conference call with key campaign figures such as Kellyanne Conway and Newt Gingrich, both of whom are Catholic, along with several prominent leaders of conservative Catholic organizations.

“Callista [Gingrich’s wife, currently the US ambassador to the Vatican] and I both feel assault not just on Catholicism but on people of faith, the callousness, the contempt,” Gingrich said. “Now we know what Hillary meant by deplorables. It’s people of faith.”

Conway, for her part, said that “for 30 years, Hillary Clinton has been openly hostile on issues important to Catholics.”

Eight days after the press conference, Trump was preparing for the Al Smith Dinner, an annual fundraiser for Catholic charities both presidential candidates typically attend and trade lighthearted barbs. Not Trump: Clinton, he said bluntly, “hates Catholics.”

The Kremlin may have helped Trump win the Catholic vote

Catholic groups wouldn’t let the emails go either. After saying Trump should quit the campaign, the Catholic Vote organization changed course and starting promoting his candidacy through political ads that ran straight up to Election Day.

One ad starts with a Fox News clip that described the emails as “dismissing the entire Catholic belief system” and then cut to a middle-aged woman looking directly into the camera.

“I wanted to check out of this election like most people,” she says. “But then with the Clinton campaign mocking us as Catholics, I’m back in.”

By the time the election arrived less than a month after WikiLeaks released the emails, Trump had completely overcome his summer deficit and won the Catholic vote by 7 percent, according to Pew Research exit polls.

The final results of the Catholic vote largely matched those of recent presidential elections, according to Jones. What happened was that many Catholic voters who had been hesitant about Trump over the summer eventually decided to vote for him after WikiLeaks released the stolen emails and Trump returned to the populist themes he’d used earlier in the campaign.

“These kinds of events caused people to pause, but not pull a different lever,” Jones said.

Many observers believe the single biggest factor behind Trump’s last-minute surge was then-FBI Director James Comey’s decision, less than two weeks before Election Day, to announce that the agency was reopening its investigation into Clinton’s emails. Still, the razor-thin margins in several critical, heavily Catholic states mean it’s impossible to dismiss the possibility that the WikiLeaks releases may well have impacted the election.

Halpin, Palmieri, and Podesta may have thought they were sharing innocent, and private, thoughts about the thorny politics of religion. Five years later, Trump’s campaign — with a clear assist from WikiLeaks — found a way to distort and weaponize those emails. Since the US intelligence community unanimously believes Russia stole those emails in the first place, there’s a real chance that Moscow helped deliver the Catholic vote to Donald Trump.

Meet Trump’s new legal team

2018-04-23T19:37:42-04:00

President Donald Trump has assembled a new legal team to face special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. | Alex Wong/Getty Images

A month after his personal legal team imploded over whether President Donald Trump should consent to be interviewed for special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, the president is finally rebuilding his defense.

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is the most high-profile addition to the president’s legal team, but two other lawyers joined on Thursday as well. And unlike many of the attorneys working with Trump, they have substantial — and recent — criminal courtroom experience.

Jane and Martin Raskin, a wife-and-husband criminal defense duo based in Florida, will be working on Trump’s personal legal team. The two have long histories both working for the Justice Department and as white-collar criminal defense lawyers.

The first big question they’ll have to grapple with is whether the president should agree to a Mueller interview.

John Dowd, Trump’s top personal lawyer, quit in March after repeatedly telling the president that he shouldn’t talk to Mueller as part of the ongoing investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and potential coordination with the Trump campaign. That left Jay Sekulow — a lawyer and radio host best known for defending conservative and evangelical Christian causes — as the only lawyer on Trump’s personal team. Trump has White House lawyers, but their job is to protect the institution of the presidency, not Trump himself, against potential criminal accusations.

Trump’s attempts to hire new personal lawyers haven’t gone smoothly. After Dowd left, several well-known Washington criminal defense attorneys turned Trump down. And in a bizarre week, Sekulow announced that Joseph diGenova and Victoria Toensing would join the legal team, only to say days later that they wouldn’t.

Sol Wisenberg, a white-collar criminal defense lawyer who worked on the Ken Starr investigation, told me that a lot of DC law firms are scared of working with Trump.

But Giuliani hasn’t been taking on legal clients in recent years. And the Raskins might have an easier time avoiding some of the conflicts that would prevent a lawyer from taking on Trump, partially because they have their own small practice. “If you’ve got a small firm and you’re primarily handling criminal defense matters, you really don’t have to worry about pissing off clients,” Wisenberg said.

Trump is still toying with the idea of sitting down for an interview with Mueller. Despite reports that the recent raid on Trump confidant and longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen’s office demolished negotiations for an interview, one of Trump’s White House lawyers, Ty Cobb, said the president still wants to do it. Despite their decades-long relationship, Cohen has not joined Trump’s personal Russia defense team.

Here’s the team Trump currently has to defend him if he does decide to do the interview.

Jane Raskin

Raskin is a longtime criminal defense lawyer who spent years working at the Justice Department. She started as a prosecutor as part of the agency’s Organized Crime and Racketeering Section’s Boston Strike Force.

She joined that office in 1983, according to her website, shortly after Mueller moved to Boston to become the assistant US attorney for the Justice Department’s Massachusetts office. Wisenberg described that strike force as “an elite group” and said that the Boston office was small.

“She would have to know Mueller,” he said. Raskin did not respond to a request for comment, including a question about whether she had or has a relationship with Mueller.

After working for the task force for three years, Raskin moved to Washington, DC, to work for the Justice Department’s criminal division. When she left the Justice Department, she joined the Hale & Dorr law firm. Although they did overlap there, Mueller joined the same law firm nearly two decades after he completed his term as FBI director.

In 1990, Raskin left the firm and started an independent law practice with her husband, Martin.

Martin Raskin

Before joining his wife for their law practice, Martin Raskin had his own history with the Justice Department.

He was an assistant US attorney for the District of New Jersey for three years starting in 1975, according to his LinkedIn profile, before joining the Justice Department’s organized crime strike force in Miami in 1978.

He spent two years as head of the criminal division for the Miami Justice Department office, before leaving to start a practice doing criminal defense.

Martin and Jane met during a legal conference on white-collar crime, and after Martin’s law partner became a federal judge, the husband-and-wife team started practicing law together.

Since forming their own group, they have focused on criminal defense cases largely for clients tied to potential financial crimes.

In 2014, the two defended Juan Felipe Martinez, a customs agent whom a federal prosecutor indicted for extortion. A jury acquitted Martinez.

In his statement announcing that Giuliani and Jane and Martin Raskin had joined the legal team, Sekulow described them as “highly respected former federal prosecutors with decades of experience.”

While the Raskins have recent experience in the courtroom, Giuliani hasn’t argued a case in decades. He does, however, have substantial legal experience of his own.

Rudy Giuliani

Giuliani is best known as a former presidential candidate and as the mayor of New York City during the 9/11 attacks. He also was the third-ranking official in the Justice Department starting in 1981 during the administration of President Ronald Reagan.

Giuliani would later go on to lead the federal prosecutor’s office in Manhattan in 1983, where James Comey worked for him, before running for mayor of New York in 1989.

Giuliani lost that election, but ran again and won in 1993.

After serving as mayor, he ran for the White House in 2008, losing the primary badly. He also was a named partner with the law firm Bracewell & Giuliani before leaving the firm in 2016.

Giuliani was a major supporter of Trump during the campaign, frequently appearing on Fox News to defend the candidate.

While Jane and Martin Raskin declined to talk to any media outlets after Sekulow announced their addition to the Trump legal team, Giuliani described his role as trying to bring the Mueller probe to a close.

“I’m doing it because I hope we can negotiate an end to this for the good of the country and because I have high regard for the president and for Bob Mueller,” Giuliani told the Washington Post.

Jay Sekulow

Before Thursday’s additions, Sekulow was the only lawyer on Trump’s personal legal team. He began his legal career working for the IRS on tax cases, before starting his own tax law firm.

In the mid-1980s, he started working on constitutional issues of interest to the Christian right, before joining the American Constitutional Law Center in 1990, where he still serves as chief counsel.

He’s argued a dozen cases before the Supreme Court in that role.

Sekulow became famous for his work on religious litigation, eventually starring in his own radio show talking about conservative issues.

Sekulow has served as the spokesperson for the Trump legal team since he joined in June 2017. He’s frequently appeared on television to defend Trump.

Now several lawyers with criminal defense experience are joining him. While Sekulow is likely to remain the face of the president’s defense against Mueller’s Russia probe, Trump appears to have done what flummoxed him for much of March and put together a legal team.

“Obviously, they know what the hell they’re doing,” Wisenberg told me.

Rudy Giuliani is Trump’s new lawyer. His history with Comey could spell trouble.

2018-04-20T14:16:31-04:00

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani speaks to reporters at Trump Tower, January 12, 2017. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

After months of chaos, infighting, and high-profile departures, President Donald Trump has made a surprising addition to his legal team: former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who’s better known today as a rabidly pro-Trump TV personality than as a top-notch legal mind.

Giuliani, 73, has been one of Trump’s biggest public boosters and gave a keynote speech at the GOP convention after Trump won the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. He’s also regularly appeared on television to defend Trump against charges of collusion with Russia and other alleged misdeeds.

But despite early rumors that Trump might pick him to be the attorney general, Giuliani was never given a formal position in the administration. In his new job, Giuliani still won’t be a technical part of the White House, but he’ll have a formal role on Team Trump and serve as the president’s closest advisers.

He’ll be coming on at a pivotal and dangerous moment for the administration. Trump’s legal team has been decimated by a wave of departures just as special counsel Robert Mueller has markedly ramped up his investigation into Trump and many of his closest aides. Mueller recently gave information to federal prosecutors in New York on Trump’s close confidant Michael Cohen, which led to an April 9 raid of his offices, and has reached plea deals with four former Trump associates. He seems to be methodically building a potential obstruction of justice case against Trump.

For Giuliani, the immediate priority will be to help decide whether Trump should sit down for a high-stakes interview with Mueller. The most recent head of Trump’s legal team, John Dowd, resigned after Trump disregarded his warnings about the perils of such a meeting and insisted that he wanted to sit down with Mueller and his team.

There are also growing fears that Trump may move to fire Mueller or his boss, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. For now, at least, Giuliani is striking a moderate tone and promising to work with the special counsel to negotiate an end to the investigation.

Giuliani is joining Trump’s team just as the president escalates a very bitter, and very public, fight with former FBI Director James Comey, whose new book, A Higher Loyalty, paints Trump as a liar who runs his administration like a mob boss

The former mayor will have a very personal reason for joining the White House broad and nasty attack on Comey: the fact the former FBI chief’s book blasts the former mayor almost as harshly as it blasts Trump.

Comey had ordered FBI agents to open a leak investigation into Giuliani

Comey and Giuliani have been battling since the fall of 2016, when the former mayor made a series of cryptic statements about an upcoming “surprise” just two days before Comey announced in late October 2016 that he was reopening his investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.

FBI investigators had found new emails on a computer used by Clinton’s aide, Huma Abedin, after Comey closed the investigation in July of that year. The FBI reviewed the new emails in a couple of days and closed the probe again before the election. Still, Clinton and her defenders have long argued that the Comey announcement was the decisive factor that helped Trump win the White House.

Giuliani later confirmed that his hints about a “surprise” were about Comey’s announcement and that FBI agents told him about the new trove of emails. However, Giuliani subsequently changed his story and said that Comey’s decision to reopen the case was a “complete surprise” to him.

Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee in May 2017, less than a week before Trump fired him from his post at the FBI, that the agency was “looking into” where Giuliani might have gotten his information, though he didn’t mention the former mayor by name.

On Thursday night, Comey repeated that claim in an interview on MSNBC and said.

“I don’t know what the result of that was, I got fired before it was finished, but I know that I asked that it be investigated,” Comey said.

Left unsaid was how much of his book was devoted to blasting his former boss.

Comey hasn’t just gone after Trump. He’s been going after Giuliani, too.

That investigation wasn’t the first time that Comey had dealt with Giuliani.

Before he became mayor, Giuliani was a federal prosecutor in New York, running the Manhattan US attorney’s office where Comey worked.

Comey writes extensively about his impressions of Giuliani in his new book, but the overall theme is simple. Comey thinks Giuliani is a showman with an insatiable desire for public attention and acclaim.

“Rudy’s demeanor left a trail of resentment among the dozens of federal judges in Manhattan, many of whom had worked in that U.S. attorney’s office,” Comey wrote. “They thought he made the office about one person, himself, and used publicity about his cases as a way to foster his political ambitions rather than doing justice.”

Elsewhere in the book, Comey calls Giuliani’s leadership style “dangerous,” and says that it created “resentment” among judges towards the US attorney’s office, which Comey would go on to lead, for years.

Trump chose to hire Giuliani despite the FBI investigation and the former mayor’s controversial tenure as a federal prosecutor and mayor. The question now is whether Giuliani will prove capable of doing something his predecessors on Trump’s legal team couldn’t: figure out how to protect a moody, dishonest and impulsive client from the skilled prosecutors who seem to be drawing closer and closer to Trump and his inner circle.

Could New York state prosecutors bring charges against Cohen even if Trump pardons him?

2018-04-19T17:31:13-04:00

Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump's personal attorney, takes a phone call on April 13, 2018. | Yana Paskova/Getty Images

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman could indict Trump attorney Michael Cohen for breaking state laws regardless of whether Cohen was convicted of breaking federal versions of those same laws — and regardless of whether Trump pardoned him. The article has been updated with the correct information.

Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, is potentially facing years in prison as federal agents look into payoffs to a pair of women who claim they had affairs with Trump before he won the White House.

The good news for Cohen is that Trump could pardon him for violating federal campaign finance or banking laws, a step that would keep him out of the crosshairs of New York state prosecutors as well. The bad news is that those same prosecutors could try to come after him for related crimes — and, if New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman gets his way, the original crimes too.

Here’s why: New York has laws that closely mirror the federal ones Cohen stands accused of breaking. Under the state’s double jeopardy statutes, New York prosecutors couldn’t go after Cohen if Trump pardoned him for a specific federal crime. But they could go after him for related ones.

Take federal wire transfer and banking laws, which Cohen may have broken if he lied about the reason he got a loan to pay off one of the women and transferred her $130,000. That would also be illegal in New York, which outlaws both bank and wire fraud. New York prosecutors could go after Cohen for bank fraud even if Trump pardoned him after a conviction for federal wire fraud charges. The big difference would be that Cohen would have no White House protection.

Schneiderman hasn’t announced any kind of investigation into Cohen, but he has been coordinating closely with the Justice Department and special counsel Robert Mueller on their investigation into former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort. Some commentators argued that the early charges against Manafort, which didn’t reference as many potential crimes as many had expected, were a sign that Mueller was leaving the door open for state prosecution and avoiding the double jeopardy issue.

But if he gets his way, Schneiderman may soon be able to go after Cohen even more directly.

In a letter to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the Democratic and Republican leaders of the state House and Senate Wednesday, Schneiderman asked state lawmakers to pass legislation that would allow for prosecuting people on the state level for the exact crimes they were convicted of — and pardoned for — on the federal level.

That would mean modifying the state’s current double jeopardy provisions to ensure that someone like Cohen couldn’t evade state scrutiny after a federal pardon.

“Simply put,” Schneiderman wrote, under the current law “a defendant pardoned by the President for a serious Federal Crime could be freed from all accountability under federal and state criminal law.”

New York state Sen. Todd Kaminsky announced he’d be introducing a bill with a fix Thursday or Friday, though it’s unclear if, or when, it would make its way through New York’s fractious state government and be signed into law.

It’s not just Mueller: Cohen could also face a wide range of state charges

Although federal prosecutors haven’t revealed the specifics of their investigation into Cohen, the Washington Post reported that the major focus of the investigation is payoffs to women in exchange for their silence on claims of affairs with Trump.

One of the payoffs, to porn actress Stormy Daniels, came directly from Cohen, who claimed he used a personal loan to gather the $130,000 he gave her.

Federal investigators are reportedly looking at whether Cohen lied to banks in order to get the money. If he did, that would constitute federal bank and wire fraud. Jed Shugerman, a professor at Fordham Law, wrote that those crimes would fall under “scheme to defraud” under New York state law, which means Cohen could face state felony charges.

If the $130,000 payment was meant to help Trump win the election (something Cohen denies), it could count as a campaign contribution that was well in excess of federal limits. Beyond the possible federal crime, Cohen could also be charged with breaking New York state law if he made a false statement to a bank or to investigators about how he used the money.

Cohen also had a central role in contacts between Trump’s business and Russian officials, which could mean trouble if there was actual collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

To take one example, Cohen was the Trump Organization’s point person for the Trump Tower Moscow project in 2015, even asking the Kremlin for help to get the project approved. That deal is why Mueller reportedly looked into Cohen. Mueller brought the details of what he’d found to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who decided that the federal prosecutor in New York should handle an investigation into Cohen.

If Cohen used any of the contacts he made with the Russian government to try to influence the election, he could face state election fraud charges. New York state law bans trying to get a candidate elected by “unlawful means,” and working with the Russians would likely fall under another section of the law that bans interfering with the “free exercise of the elective franchise.”

And if Cohen lied as part of any filings tied to his finances or his work with the Trump Organization, or as part of any of his dealings with investigators, he could face state obstruction of justice charges.

The key question is whether New York prosecutors could find ways of indicting Cohen for crimes different from the ones he was charged for on the federal level. That’s because a Trump pardon wouldn’t simply nullify any potential federal conviction — it would, under current New York law, bar state prosecutors from trying to go after him themselves.

If so, and if they won a conviction in a New York court, Cohen couldn’t look to the White House for salvation.

“None of these [state charges] would be subject to pardon by President Trump,” Cornell Law professor Jens David Ohlin told me.

Federal prosecutors are aware of the double jeopardy risk, and in the case of Paul Manafort, it appears that Mueller may have shaped his charges to leave state prosecutors space to go after him on their own.

Mueller may be giving state prosecutors a road map

When Mueller’s office filed charges against Manafort, they included a range of financial crimes. But the charges puzzled some experts because there were several obvious potential cases tied to those crimes that didn’t appear.

“There is a glaring omission in the indictment,” conservative commentator Andrew McCarthy wrote last year.

Although Mueller added new charges against Manafort in February, there’s still a range of tax and fraud charges that Mueller hasn’t used. That could be because he’s making sure that New York state prosecutors have ammunition in the event that Trump pardons Cohen after a federal conviction.

Mueller has been working with Schneiderman since August, and the decision about federal charges could well be a way for Mueller to ensure that targets of his investigation can’t get off with a pardon. Even if Trump fires Mueller, New York prosecutors could proceed with cases.

The pardon issue isn’t theoretical, as the New York Times reported last month that Trump’s former personal lawyer John Dowd discussed pardons with several people charged by Mueller, including Manafort.

Thus far, Trump hasn’t suggested that he’ll pardon Cohen, although he has repeatedly defended him in public as a “good man.”

As it currently stands, the president could decide to give his lawyer a get-out-of-jail-free card for any federal convictions, which would also shield him from being prosecuted for those same crimes on the state level.

Unfortunately for Cohen, New York prosecutors still have some tricks up their sleeves — and may soon get even more of them.

Sean Hannity was Michael Cohen’s mystery client

2018-04-17T09:56:15-04:00

Sean Hannity on April 12, 2018, in New York City. | Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images

A federal judge forced President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen to reveal the identity of a secret client. It’s Fox News host and Trump ally Sean Hannity.

Cohen was trying to protect Hannity’s name as part of a lawsuit he filed to prevent the FBI from searching through the documents agents took on April 9 during a raid on Cohen’s office and hotel room.

On Friday, federal Judge Kimba Wood, who is presiding over Cohen’s lawsuit, told Cohen’s lawyers that she wanted a list of Cohen’s clients to make a decision on whether to stop the FBI from reviewing the seized materials.

In a Monday morning court filing, Cohen’s lawyers revealed two of the three clients that Cohen had between 2017 and 2018 but refused to name the third.

On Monday afternoon, during a hearing, Wood rejected the plea from Cohen’s team and demanded to be told who the third client was.

“I understand that he doesn’t want his name out there, but that’s not enough under the law,” Wood said.

After a back-and-forth in which Cohen’s lawyers offered to tell the judge confidentially, they gave in and announced the unnamed client was Hannity.

Hannity confirmed the news after Cohen’s team announced his name.

“I have sought legal advice from Michael,” he said in a statement.

The news broke while Hannity was broadcasting his live radio program on Monday afternoon. Hannity referenced the Cohen hearing but didn’t directly address it.

“I think it’s pretty funny,” he said. “I’ll decide if I’m going to put out a statement here.”

The other two clients to whom Cohen provided legal advice since Trump took office are Trump and Elliott Broidy, according to Monday morning’s court filing.

Wood had yet to rule on whether the FBI would be allowed to go through the documents when she demanded Hannity’s name.

Update: After this piece was published a spokesperson for Fox News contacted me and asked for Vox to publish a full statement from Sean Hannity, which is included below.

“Michael Cohen has never represented me in any matter. I never retained him, received an invoice, or paid legal fees. I have occasionally had brief discussions with him about legal questions about which I wanted his input and perspective. I assumed those conversations were confidential, but to be absolutely clear they never involved any matter between me and a third party.”