Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation Hardcover – September 29, 2020

The book entitled: “Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation” by Andrew Weissmann provides an interesting and informative, readable summary of the Mueller investigation; it is well-referenced and thorough except for areas preclude by reasons of security or as part of the pre-approval executive review process. Weissmann, an experienced DoJ prosecutors who had worked on large mob and Enron cases and served as one of 3 lead prosecutors on the Mueller team goes behind the scenes to share what happened to protect the rule of law. The author, Mindful of all of the successful convictions that came out of the Mueller investigation and the current special counsel statutory restrictions, in contrast with more independence allowed by previous laws and while largely supportive of the tight rope that Mueller walked, feels that Mueller could have been more aggressive in pursuing leads and that Trump and Barr went out of their way to distort the truth and undermine the investigation. The author states: “Thus our report laid out the proof of his criminal conduct in detail, but did not give our legal assessment of it—we never said outright that he’d committed a crime. Instead, we had left it to Congress to make its own assessment of our evidence, or to another prosecutor in the future, who would be free to indict the president once he’d left office.” He goes on to state: “Barr’s letter … purported “to summarize the principal conclusions reached by the Special Counsel and the results of his investigation,” but it contained so many deceptions, it was hard to take them all in. Some were delicately worded obfuscations. Some were unbridled lies.” Weissmann states: “… this book records our work in the Special Counsel’s Office and how it culminated in our end product, the final report issued on March 22, 2019, to the attorney general of the United States.” And furthermore: “The principal challenge to our investigation was the threat posed by the unique powers of the president that were continually wielded against us: the power to fire us and to pardon wrongdoers who might otherwise cooperate with our investigation.” The author’s view was: “Mueller had the task of assessing whether any given investigative step that risked inflaming Trump, and provoking our firing, was important enough to warrant the risk.” And “The president’s dangling of pardons to those who were considering cooperating with our investigation served, by design, to thwart our uncovering the true facts.” He talks about the value of being able to flip witnesses and the lengthy investigation and occasional lucky breaks. From time to time he explains detailed legal arguments including items like evidence and sufficient evidence to convince and convict beyond a reasonable doubt. Weissmann explains for the uninitiated the value of having subpoenaed email type of material before questioning suspects or parties as a test on the truthfulness of the person being questioned. He explains the history and penalties for FARA or Foreign Agents Registration Act violations. The author states: “It was vitally important, Mueller explained, that our office speak through our actions: any arrests made, complaints sworn out, indictments issued, briefs filed.” The author states that: “Other evidence detailed Manafort’s relationship with Oleg Deripaska, the powerful Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin. We had been aware of Manafort’s ties to Deripaska, but it was breathtaking to see the extent and nature of their dealings laid out in black and white. In short, this was all evidence that Manafort was a hired gun, willing to subvert governments at the behest of Deripaska and his Kremlin overseers. In terms of “links” between Russia and the Trump campaign—one of the key topics we were tasked to investigate—this certainly confirmed Manafort was one.” Related to the infamous Trump tower meeting the author says: “His initial approach to Don Jr. read: Good morning … Russia … offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia … The email said it explicitly: The Russian government was seeking to help Trump and hurt Clinton, and this meeting was being called so that the Russians could give the former “dirt” on the latter. And it was only “part” of the government’s support for Trump. To have this all spelled out so clearly, in writing, was a bombshell.” And “There it was: The Russians made an offer. The campaign accepted.” Also the author relates that: “In fact, Papadopoulos appeared to be working to set up a meeting between Trump and Putin. “Russia has been eager to meet Mr. Trump for quite some time,” he wrote to others on the campaign in May 2016” Weissmann states: “Papadopoulos agreed to plead guilty to lying to the FBI” Author Weissmann states: “Facebook agreed. The company’s representatives also walked our investigators through how its platform permitted users to target ads, delivering their messaging to distinct demographic audiences online. This, too, was of use to Team R, allowing them to investigate if and how the Russians had pushed certain content on the platform to certain types of users.” Moreover, Weissmann claims: “Russia’s work was plainly undertaken to support Trump—who nevertheless has consistently denied, contrary to all of this unassailable evidence, that Russia wanted him to win the presidency, much less helped him win it.” Weissmann shares detailed evidence in a easy to understand manner and is frank about the role that luck and timing played in finding some of the evidence. He also shares how the special counsel spun off related investigations that were apparently not in the main stream of their charter to other investigators including, for example, the investigation of Michael Cohen. The author reminds us that: “Deutsche Bank, a large German financial institution that had, over years, loaned enormous sums to Trump.” And explained the continuous threat to be fired in the pushed too hard to do financial investigations outside of their charter and the tightrope the Mueller walked to conduct an in-depth investigation while following DoJ regulations under the AG and President’s authority. Weissmann explains how Manafort and Gates skimmed money off the campaign for personal use and some of the consequences of that action. The author states: “President Trump railed against our office and our indictments though I found I couldn’t make sense of his objections.” The author spoke of the difficulty flipping Gates and Manafort and recalled back that: “One prominent mob defense lawyer wisecracked to me that there was so much flipping going on, the Colombo family was now being referred to among defense attorneys as the House of Pancakes” Weissmann shares that: “As we had done countless times before, we obtained a court order from Chief Judge Howell, served it on the carrier, and soon unexpectedly had in our hands hundreds of texts between Manafort and the Fox News host Sean Hannity. … Communicating with Hannity about the case was a violation of the gag order Judge Jackson had put in place on both sides so as not to taint the jury. But Manafort was undeterred by such legal niceties as a court order” The author goes on to state: “Team R … revealed, with microscopic granularity, how a separate unit of the Russian government had pulled off a cyber break-in that made the Watergate burglary look like a child’s game. This unit, a component of the Russian military, is known colloquially as the GRU” and “The Special Counsel’s Office would charge twelve GRU operatives with various crimes, including conspiracies to commit computer fraud, identity theft, and money laundering.” The author recalling a statement by Mueller states: ““It would be about money”—that is, that Trump was motivated by money and his fawning behavior toward Putin could be explained by his seeking to make a buck in Russia. … Mueller’s comment did not result in our getting the green light to do a full-scale financial investigation of the president.” Weissmann reflecting on the integrity of some political appointees says: “McGahn is a traditional conservative Republican who clearly understood his obligation as a public servant to provide truthful information to our investigation. In retrospect, his conduct was in striking contrast to that of senior public administration officials in connection with the House and Senate impeachment proceedings—where officials such as Mike Pompeo and Mick Mulvaney refused to cooperate with a lawful inquiry.” As more facts became known, the author states: “Sater proceeded to offer up proof indicating that Cohen had lied to Congress about one of the president’s real estate endeavors in Russia, plans for a luxury high-rise that would be known as Trump Tower Moscow.” As some of the team wanted to push further, the author says” “Needless to say, this meant that Trump’s tax returns were out of bounds. It was agonizing to be told, again and again by Aaron, not to follow any of these leads,” Moreover, “In the end, we would fail to conduct a full investigation, and we never got an interview with the president.” And: “An investigation into Trump’s finances could have produced important evidence perhaps better delineating a motive for the president to curry favor with Russia, or for Russia to assist Trump in the election. Criminal investigations routinely examine motive.” Weissmann states: “Cohen had implicated another person while pleading to the campaign violation charge—the individual who’d authorized his payments to Stormy Daniels, referred to in the indictment as “Individual 1.” The press would quickly identify Individual 1 as President Trump.” The author devotes a chapter to discussing the pros and cons of “Subpoenaing the President.” Weissmann speaking of the challenges of getting Manafort to be forthright states: “We knew that although he was hard up for cash and increasingly awash in debt, he’d agreed to work for Trump for free in order to get the job. The kickback scheme would allow him to take in money behind Trump’s back; … it would explain why Manafort had been so insistent that the campaign form PACs, in spite of candidate Trump’s resistance to them. … “Admitting this means admitting that he was stealing money from a PAC that was supposed to be working to get Trump elected. That’s not going to help his chances for a pardon.”” Weissmann in one chapter provides many details of the challenges of writing the final report, including a discussion of two views of whether or not a sitting President can be indicted while in office. The author reminds the reader that: “As a special counsel, Mueller had to follow the Justice Department’s rules—including the OLC opinions.”At the end of his book, Weissmann offers some suggestions for improving the current laws for such special counsel investigations.

I know some commenters will say I’m lying, I can’t possibly be a Republican because I maintain that President Trump doesn’t exemplify my idea of a Republican President. I can still believe in my party while disagreeing with their current and frankly mind-boggling nominee. But Trump is president until we vote in someone else.That's the blessing of a democracy. If we don't like the guy who's in office, we just wait a few years and try again. But even Trump – or any President – should be kept in check and limited to their assigned roles more readily by adopting reforms to ensure the rule of law is honored. And Andrew Weissmann, in this book, Where the Law Ends, has some logical and feasible suggestions.I think we need suggestions and ideas such as Weissmann’s, because our Presidents have started to stray and use their power in such a way that shows how close we are to stepping over the line and having our democracy destroyed. I’ve often wondered what it would take to break America down, and now I fear it could be a President’s irresponsible abuse of power, a pandemic, and foreign interference. However, I have hope, because this is America, and we’ve made it through hard times before and emerged stronger and more united.While Where the Law Ends is a weighty tome of a book, its most remarkable material is in the introduction and the epilogue. There Weissmann briefly summarizes the depth and breadth of the offenses and suggests reforms that would keep Presidents from overstepping their authority, disrespecting the rule of law, and abusing those who are performing their jobs by threatening them, firing them arbitrarily, or pardoning those who are being investigated. We shouldn’t have a President who has no loyalty, no respect, and no love for our country, our constitution, or our laws, flouting them with impunity, no matter their party.As for the middle of this book, it is a necessary and important factual recounting of the Mueller investigation. Necessary because we must record history and remember it accurately to learn from it and prevent it from recurring. I’d dock this book half a star because I found it so dry, and yet I must give it a star for completeness and a lack of hysterical drama. And Weissmann really demonstrates why the Mueller investigation was reported the way that it was, in its actual report and in Barr’s inaccurate summation. Because they tried so hard to keep the letter of the law, they were capsized by those who had no regard for the law at all, but only politics and power.Overall, this is an incredibly important account, but if you’re like me (I admit to ADD), use your favorite methods to keep your concentration so if you lag during the middle uber-factual recounting, you can keep focused and not lose yourself in the details. I have a feeling that Where the Law Ends is going to end up being required reading at universities.A few quotes:“As one small witness to history, I now know that the death of our democracy is possible. Fixing it is possible, too.”“When I read our report now, I see a document caught in the tension between our stated and de facto missions. In part, the report reads as a highly legalistic internal Justice Department document, akin to the scrupulously detailed prosecution memoranda prepared by prosecutors before bringing an indictment. At the same time, it is addressed to the American people—a public accounting of the facts we uncovered. Ultimately, the report does not serve either purpose adequately.”“First, a report that was truly addressed to the public would have been structured and written in a more straightforward manner, without the legal nomenclature of an internal prosecution memo. It would have drawn conclusions more clearly and explicitly, rather than risk overwhelming those conclusions with long, narrow disquisitions about the interpretation and application of the law. Such a report would have been more transparent about what we did not investigate, such as the president’s finances, and why, and would better emphasize which questions we were not able, or permitted, to sufficiently answer, such as the Department’s obstacles in seeking to interview and subpoena the president. And it would have proposed remedial steps to deal with problems like Russian interference, just as the 9/11 Commission Report addressed the threat of future terrorist attacks.”“We must first recognize that the power to pardon is conferred on the presidency—it is not a personal power of the man or woman who inhabits the office. As president, that person has a sworn duty to uphold the law fully and faithfully, not to undermine or invalidate it. And so, where a pardon is being used to protect the president personally, or to protect the president’s family, friends, or conspirators, it should not be seen as a valid exercise of that constitutional power.”“The special counsel’s report was a devastating recitation of how Russian government operatives had infiltrated our electoral process, a conclusion that we all believed to be our most important long-term finding and one that required immediate and decisive action by our political leaders. As to whether any member of the Trump campaign, or anyone else, conspired with the Russians, our report was mixed. We had found insufficient evidence to criminally charge a conspiracy with the Russians beyond a reasonable doubt—the high standard of proof required for any criminal charge and conviction. But the frequency and seriousness of interactions we uncovered between the campaign and the Russians were nevertheless chilling, with Trump campaign officials both receptive to, and soliciting, Russian assistance throughout the summer and fall of 2016.”“The facts here were no less appalling, although we had not indicted the president or, frustratingly, even taken the final leap of putting a label on what the facts added up to. Instead, our report set out numerous episodes that provided clear evidence against the president. However, we were forbidden from indicting him for these crimes, as we were employees of the Department of Justice and bound to follow an internal Department policy that no president could be indicted while in office—whether we agreed with that rule or not.”

Excellent read from someone who actually knows what went on behind the scenes of Mueller report. Barr should be ashamed. Republican members of Congress should resign! This report spells out outrageous crimes against voting Americans. And I am a Republican! May have to change parties before 2024!! Fed up!!

Reading about the Trump Presidency can take over your life and while much of the literature is good, you have to read a lot to get several perspectives on the actions of even individual actors. Add to that is the requirement, I think, that the author really has to be an active and prominent lawyer before you get much more than politically loaded rubbish.So, if you are determined to have just a short shelf on the Trump years, you have to seriously consider adding this book to it. After the Special Counsel's Report itself (the Mueller Report, as it is sometimes called), this would book would have to be on the shelf beside it.There are many threads to the Trump story that this contributes to, but the two most important ones are i) the Manafort prosecutions and ii) the debate about the obstruction of the Special Counsel's investigation by the White House, which can reasonably include Bill Barr's port-Report actions.i) The author was the lead prosecutor in "Team M", so his description of the actual investigations fleshes out the what Manafort and his co-conspirators (Gates and Kilimnik mainly) were up to. Current readers will be struck by how instrumental Manafort was in the Russian preparations to invade and take over parts of Ukraine. Manafort's actions resonate today in bloodshed, but that of course is not what he was prosecuted for. He did it all for money and so it was only his criminal actions in getting and laundering and avoiding taxes on money are what he was prosecuted for...and for witness tampering even while he was being tried for the money matters.ii) The concluding chapters are a really important addition to the debate about needed reforms in the Special Counsel regulations. After reading those I found it useful to go back again to Chapter 8 of Bauer and Goldsmith's Chapter 8 in After Trump. Look it up.This is a Trump book that I will study and read again. It is a lot more than the narrative fluff that dominates the Trump literature.

If you want a real life detective story about all the investigative steps taken or not in the independent counsel’s investigation this is the book for you. Although I had read a lot about the independent counsel’s inquiry, there is even more insider’s knowledge in this book. The author seemed to take some superficial shots at James Comey, but hey you either love him or hate him.

Weissman is the best and most credible of non journalists. His book is a “ how it should be-done”he writes well. He is humbe,honest and clear. If the world needs an honest broker and a clear speaking advocate for reasonableness and incisive analysis-Andrew Weissman is a star.

The book reminded me of a line from the above song, “he wants it all and he wants it his way”. The book reads like a detective thriller and also reminded me of “All The President’s Men”. The author writes it chronologically and you get caught up with what’s going to happen next as he takes you through the events as they are happening. You feel as if you are in the room where it happened as the net closes around Trump. He responds by tweeting more and more hysterical attacks on anyone and everyone who doesn’t take his side. A.W. takes you through it all from the interviewing of the staff to carry out the Inquiry to the denouement.It’s quite exciting as you read the discovery of an email which is dynamite for the investigation, or someone being interviewed and confesses to something equally incredible. The investigation was split into 3 groups: Team R, Team M, and Team 600 ie. Russia, Manefort, and Obstruction. AW runs Team M and gets to realize that he is just a mini-me of Trump. In other words, somebody who believes that rules and the law do not apply to him and that there is nothing he wouldn’t do to enrich himself. AW had been extremely successful in prosecuting Enron and bringing down Mafia bosses. He explains the main tool he used was getting dirt on lower employees in the organization to flip on the top dogs.The more the team dug the more worried they became as they realized that the new President was totally lawless and there would be no limit that all the president’s men would go to for his interests. This is whether to protect him or increase his interests, usually financial. The information they got included private memos that Trump wrote which showed his frame of mind. They were full of bile, hostility, self-importance, self-gratification and total disregard for laws and norms unless they benefited him. The White House attorneys are supposed to work for the public, the WH as an institution, not the president personally. “We realized that the Oval Office was the Magic Kingdom- a reality-free zone, with just the ravings of our own Mad King George to deal with”.The main tool of getting people to flip was blocked more often than not due to the ravings of Trump. “It would become increasingly clear that Trump was wielding the presidential power of pardon as an enticement to deter witnesses from co-operating with our office, while simultaneously wielding his power to fire Mueller as a threat to keep us reined in”. This ever-present threat weakened them so much that they were too afraid to do many things they would normally do, such as subpoena the president. AW constantly compares how similar the work is to investigating a mafia organization in how it functions. Similar threats and pressures are there but it is much worse in this situation. A mafia boss could not close down his own investigation as could Trump. This meant, with the rules that they had to operate under, and Trump’s special powers, the Inquiry only did part of what they could have and should have done.In essence, AW states, the team got played by Attorney General Barr. They assumed that his personal friendship with Mueller would mean that Barr would play fair. The longer the investigation went on, they all realized that Barr was operating as Trump’s personal lawyer rather than on behalf of the people. In other words, he was getting money under false pretenses and was being totally immoral. The team that played by the rules lost, the team that played dirty won. The last chapter is spent analyzing Barr’s statements and explanations which prove that he is the second most dangerous man in America. AW also makes suggestions on how to ensure that the democracy is not ridden roughshod again by a lawless president only interested in himself.I write this as Trump is in hospital with Covid, the hoax as he declared originally. He said, “it will be gone by Easter”. Over 208,000 deaths later, and rising, even his most fanatical cult members now realize that it’s not just another variation of the flu. Due to his complete mismanagement of the epidemic from the start up to now many have died that should not have. The way he has treated the Ukraine has meant a greater number of Ukrainian deaths as a result, according to experts, by the Russian invasion. When the 63 million people voted for him in 2016, they did not realize that they were giving him a license to kill.

J'avais lu plusieurs livres sur les aventures de Trump et Cie ( collusion, corruption , et quelques autres) et j'ai trouvé que ce livre m'a présenté une vision d'ensemble de l'oeuvre de Trump, sa famille et ses amis. En somme, un excellent sommaire exécutif.