Trump-Mueller report: President retreats to Mar-a-Lago as Democrats issue subpoenas and talk impeachment
Document paints damning picture of a White House torn apart by lies and mistrust
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Donald Trump has flown to his private resort in Florida for the Easter holiday, as lawmakers on Capitol Hill issue subpoenas and discuss impeachment proceedings in the wake of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report.
The president exploded on Twitter the morning after the report’s release to the public, calling statements included in the nearly 450-page document “bulls**t.”
“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,” he tweeted Friday. “Watch out for people that take so-called ‘notes,’ when the notes never existed until needed. Because I never agreed to testify, it was not necessary for me to respond to statements made in the ‘Report’ about me, some of which are total bullshit & only given to make the other person look good (or me to look bad).”
Meanwhile, the House Oversight Chairman has suggested the possibility of impeaching Donald Trump in the wake of the explosive Mueller report.
“A lot of people keep asking about the question of impeachment. We may very well come to that very soon,” Elijah Cummings said in an interview with MSNBC’s Morning Joe.
Mueller investigation: The key figures
Show all 12He added, “But right now, let’s make sure we understand what Mueller was doing, understand what [Attorney General William] Barr was doing, and see the report in an unredacted form, and all of the underlying documents.”
Mr Mueller laid out multiple episodes in which the president directed others to influence or curtail the Russia investigation after the special counsel’s appointment in May 2017.
The report says those efforts “were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the president declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests”.
The attorney general said on Thursday a version of the report with fewer redactions will be made available to a small group of lawmakers.
He said all redactions would be removed from that version of the report except those relating to grand-jury information.
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So many questions to this tweet by former FBI chief James Comey, whose firing by Donald Trump was the reason Robert Mueller was appointed to investigate the president.
Presumably this is a reference to the release of the Mueller report, but is the image for those who couldn't "see the wood for the trees"? Or something to do with Trump's infamous suggestion of raking forest floors in order to avoid forest fires?? ...Green shoots???
As the highly anticipated Mueller Report was released, we gained some insight as to why the Special Counsel’s team declined to prosecute Donald Trump Jr.
Trump Jr, Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort and others had participated in the infamous Trump Tower meeting in June of 2016 where a Russian lawyer claimed they had dirt on the Clinton campaign, “some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.”
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Another takeaway from Mueller's report, and even more pertinent in light of Donald Trump's continued allegations Hillary Clinton deleted 33,000 emails in order to cover up evidence of wrongdoing - a claim which the FBI has said had "no evidence" to back it up.
The investigation was slowed by messages being deleted, including by Trump campaign officials
As well as numerous guilty pleas from a number of people over lies told to Congress and the FBI during the Muller investigation, the report also registers the seeming frustration of the Mueller team that a number of potentially useful communications were deleted by those investigated. This included some people in the Trump campaign.
“Some of the individuals we interviewed or whose conduct we investigated – including some associated with the Trump campaign – deleted relevant communications or communicated… using applications that feature encryption,” the report says.
Donald Trump, perhaps surprisingly, failed to stop to talk to reporters before departing for his private Mar-a-Lago club in Florida yesterday.
BREAKING: House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi has refused to comment on whether Congress could launch impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump in the wake of damning revelations in the newly released Mueller report.
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Meanwhile, Ivanka Trump is Instagraming her trip to West Africa, including a particularly striking image of her alongside US senators, including staunch Trump ally Lindsey Graham.
The chair of the US House Intelligence Committee was in London last year asking questions about people who have been investigating Donald Trump. One of his key targets was Christopher Steele, who had written the explosive dossier on Trump and the Kremlin that was given massive publicity.
Devin Nunes was particularly keen on who the former MI6 officer had contacts in the FBI and Justice Department. He asked to meet the head of MI6, Alex Younger, and his counterparts at MI5, Andrew Parker, and GCHQ, Jeremy Fleming. Although it was far from unusual for the chair of the House Intelligence Committee to meet the heads of Britain’s security establishment, all three refused because they were wary, according to officials, of his motives. He had to make do instead with Theresa May’s deputy national security advisor, Madeleine Alessandri.
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Here is how Donald Trump's favourite TV show, Fox & Friends, is covering the morning's coverage of the explosive Mueller report's findings.
Here is the concluding paragraph of Robert Mueller's report, outlining the reasons for refusing to draw "ultimate conclusions" about Donald Trump's conduct. If specifically states that if investigators believed the president did not commit obstruction of justice, they would say so.
The Kremlin has now issued a more extensive response to the Mueller findings. Unsurprisingly, it continues to deny any role in election interference and suggested the investigation was a waster of US taxpayer money.
We regret the documents of this sort are causing direct influence on the development of Russian-US relations, whose condition leaves much to be desired," Vladimir Putin's spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said.
"Speaking less seriously I should say that in a similar situation our Audit Chamber would’ve certainly probed into what the taxpayers’ money has been wasted on. Anyway, it’s up to the US taxpayers to ask such questions."
He added: "The latest version of the Mueller report contains nothing new. All that information had been published by different sources and mass media earlier."
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