Russian Interference in 2016 US Elections and Ties to Trump Associates

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      Hunting Leaks, Trump Officials Seized Records of Democrats

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      The Justice Department seized records from Apple for metadata of House Intelligence Committee members, their aides and family members.WASHINGTON — As the Justice Department investigated who was behind leaks of classified information early in the Trump administration, it took a highly unusual step: Prosecutors subpoenaed Apple for data from the accounts of at least two Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, aides and family members. One was a minor.All told, the records of at least a dozen people tied to the committee were seized in 2017 and early 2018, including those of Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, then the panel’s top Democrat and now its chairman, according to committee officials and two other people briefed on the inquiry. Representative Eric Swalwell of California said in an interview Thursday night that he had also been notified that his data had subpoenaed.Prosecutors, under the beleaguered attorney general, Jeff Sessions, were hunting for the sources behind news media reports about contacts between Trump associates and Russia. Ultimately, the data and other evidence did not tie the committee to the leaks, and investigators debated whether they had hit a dead end and some even discussed closing the inquiry.But William P. Barr revived languishing leak investigations after he became attorney general a year later. He moved a trusted prosecutor from New Jersey with little relevant experience to the main Justice Department to work on the Schiff-related case and about a half-dozen others, according to three people with knowledge of his work who did not want to be identified discussing federal investigations.The zeal in the Trump administration’s efforts to hunt leakers led to the extraordinary step of subpoenaing communications metadata from members of Congress — a nearly unheard-of move outside of corruption investigations. While Justice Department leak investigations are routine, current and former congressional officials familiar with the inquiry said they could not recall an instance in which the records of lawmakers had been seized as part of one.Moreover, just as it did in investigating news organizations, the Justice Department secured a gag order on Apple that expired this year, according to a person familiar with the inquiry, so lawmakers did not know they were being investigated until Apple informed them last month.Prosecutors also eventually secured subpoenas for reporters’ records to try to identify their confidential sources, a move that department policy allows only after all other avenues of inquiry are exhausted.The subpoenas remained secret until the Justice Department disclosed them in recent weeks to the news organizations — The Washington Post, The New York Times and CNN — revelations that set off criticism that the government was intruding on press freedoms.The gag orders and records seizures show how aggressively the Trump administration pursued the inquiries while Mr. Trump declared war on the news media and perceived enemies whom he routinely accused of disclosing damaging information about him, including Mr. Schiff and James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director whom prosecutors focused on in the leak inquiry involving Times records.Former President Donald J. Trump repeatedly attacked Representative Adam B. Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times“Notwithstanding whether there was sufficient predication for the leak investigation itself, including family members and minor children strikes me as extremely aggressive,” said David Laufman, a former Justice Department official who worked on leak investigations. “In combination with former President Trump’s unmistakable vendetta against Congressman Schiff, it raises serious questions about whether the manner in which this investigation was conducted was influenced by political considerations rather than purely legal ones.”A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment, as did Mr. Barr and a representative for Apple.As the years wore on, some officials argued in meetings that charges were becoming less realistic, former Justice Department officials said: They lacked strong evidence, and a jury might not care about information reported years earlier.The Trump administration also declassified some of the information, making it harder for prosecutors to argue that publishing it had harmed the United States. And the president’s attacks on Mr. Schiff and Mr. Comey would allow defense lawyers to argue that any charges were attempts to wield the power of law enforcement against Mr. Trump’s enemies.But Mr. Barr directed prosecutors to continue investigating, contending that the Justice Department’s National Security Division had allowed the cases to languish, according to three people briefed on the cases. Some cases had nothing to do with leaks about Mr. Trump and involved sensitive national security information, one of the people said. But Mr. Barr’s overall view of leaks led some people in the department to eventually see the inquiries as politically motivated.Mr. Schiff called the subpoenas for data on committee members and staff another example of Mr. Trump using the Justice Department as a “cudgel against his political opponents and members of the media.”“It is increasingly apparent that those demands did not fall on deaf ears,” Mr. Schiff said in a statement. “The politicization of the department and the attacks on the rule of law are among the most dangerous assaults on our democracy carried out by the former president.”He said the department informed him in May that the investigation into his committee was closed. But he called on its independent inspector general to investigate the leak case and others that “suggest the weaponization of law enforcement,” an appeal joined by Speaker Nancy Pelosi.Early Hunt for LeaksSoon after Mr. Trump took office in 2017, press reports based on sensitive or classified intelligence threw the White House into chaos. They detailed conversations between the Russian ambassador to the United States at the time and Mr. Trump’s top aides, the president’s pressuring of the F.B.I. and other matters related to the Russia investigation.The White House was adamant that the sources be found and prosecuted, and the Justice Department began a broad look at national security officials from the Obama administration, according to five people briefed on the inquiry.While most officials were ruled out, investigators opened cases that focused on Mr. Comey and his deputy, Andrew G. McCabe, the people said. Prosecutors also began to scrutinize the House Intelligence Committee, including Mr. Schiff, as a potential source of the leaks. As the House’s chief intelligence oversight body, the committee has regular access to sensitive government secrets.Mr. Trump fired James B. Comey as F.B.I. director in 2017.Al Drago/The New York TimesJustice Department National Security Division officials briefed the deputy attorney general’s office nearly every other week on the investigations, three former department officials said.In 2017 and 2018, a grand jury subpoenaed Apple and another internet service provider for the records of the people associated with the Intelligence Committee. They learned about most of the subpoenas last month, when Apple informed them that their records had been shared but did not detail the extent of the request, committee officials said. A second service provider had notified one member of the committee’s staff about such a request last year.It was not clear why family members or children were involved, but the investigators could have sought the accounts because they were linked or on the theory that parents were using their children’s phones or computers to hide contacts with journalists.There do not appear to have been similar grand jury subpoenas for records of members or staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, according to another official familiar with the matter. A spokesman for Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee did not respond to a question about whether they were issued subpoenas. The Justice Department has declined to tell Democrats on the committee whether any Republicans were investigated.Apple turned over only metadata and account information, not photos, emails or other content, according to the person familiar with the inquiry.After the records provided no proof of leaks, prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington discussed ending that piece of their investigation. But Mr. Barr’s decision to bring in an outside prosecutor helped keep the case alive.A CNN report in August 2019 about another leak investigation said prosecutors did not recommend to their superiors that they charge Mr. Comey over memos that he wrote and shared about his interactions with Mr. Trump, which were not ultimately found to contain classified information.Mr. Barr was wary of how Mr. Trump would react, according to a person familiar with the situation. Indeed, Mr. Trump berated the attorney general, who defended the department, telling the president that there was no case against Mr. Comey to be made, the person said. But an investigation remained open into whether Mr. Comey had leaked other classified information about Russia.Revived CasesIn February 2020, Mr. Barr placed the prosecutor from New Jersey, Osmar Benvenuto, into the National Security Division. His background was in gang and health care fraud prosecutions.Through a Justice Department spokesman, Mr. Benvenuto declined to comment.Mr. Benvenuto’s appointment was in keeping with Mr. Barr’s desire to keep matters of great interest to the White House in the hands of a small circle of trusted aides and officials.William P. Barr brought a trusted prosecutor in from New Jersey to help investigate leak cases.Al Drago for The New York TimesWith Mr. Benvenuto involved in the leak inquiries, the F.B.I. questioned Michael Bahar, a former House Intelligence Committee staff member who had gone into private practice in May 2017. The interview, conducted in late spring of 2020, did not yield evidence that led to charges.Prosecutors also redoubled efforts to find out who had leaked material related to Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser. Details about conversations he had in late 2016 with the Russian ambassador at the time, Sergey I. Kislyak, appeared in news reports in early 2017 and eventually helped prompt both his ouster and federal charges against him. The discussions had also been considered highly classified because the F.B.I. had used a court-authorized secret wiretap of Mr. Kislyak to monitor them.But John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence and close ally of Mr. Trump’s, seemed to damage the leak inquiry in May 2020, when he declassified transcripts of the calls. The authorized disclosure would have made it more difficult for prosecutors to argue that the news stories had hurt national security.Separately, one of the prosecutors whom Mr. Barr had directed to re-examine the F.B.I.’s criminal case against Mr. Flynn interviewed at least one law enforcement official in the leak investigation after the transcripts were declassified, a move that a person familiar with the matter labeled politically fraught.The biweekly updates on the leak investigations between top officials continued. Julie Edelstein, the deputy chief of counterintelligence and export control, and Matt Blue, the head of the department’s counterterrorism section, briefed John C. Demers, the head of the National Security Division, and Seth DuCharme, an official in the deputy attorney general’s office, on their progress. Mr. Benvenuto was involved in briefings with Mr. Barr.Mr. Demers, Ms. Edelstein, Mr. Blue and Mr. Benvenuto are still at the Justice Department. Their continued presence and leadership roles would seem to ensure that Mr. Biden’s appointees, including Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, would have a full understanding of the investigations. More

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      McGahn Affirmed That Trump Tried to Oust Mueller

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      The former White House counsel testified behind closed doors last week about the former president’s attempts to interfere with the Russia investigation.WASHINGTON — Donald F. McGahn II, who served as White House counsel to former President Donald J. Trump, has told lawmakers that episodes involving him in the Russia report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, were accurate — including one Mr. Trump has denied in which the president pressed him to get the Justice Department to remove Mr. Mueller.A 241-page transcript of Mr. McGahn’s closed-door testimony from last week, released on Wednesday by the House Judiciary Committee, contained no major revelations. But it opened a window on Mr. McGahn’s struggles to serve as the top lawyer in a chaotic White House, under a president who often pushed the limits of appropriate behavior.“They don’t teach you this in law school,” Mr. McGahn said of one episode he witnessed in which Mr. Trump was trying to get his attorney general at the time, Jeff Sessions, to resign because he had recused himself from the Russia investigation.Mr. McGahn was a major witness to many of the episodes outlined in the second volume of the Mueller report, which focused on actions Mr. Trump took to obstruct the investigation. After then-Attorney General William P. Barr — who said none of those episodes amounted to a chargeable crime — released most of the report in 2019, Democrats subpoenaed Mr. McGahn, hoping for a dramatic televised hearing.But the Trump Justice Department fought to block the subpoena, leading to a protracted and complex court battle. It came to an end when the Biden Justice Department struck a deal with House Democrats to permit Mr. McGahn to testify, but under strict limits: It would take place in private, and he could only be asked about information in the public portions of the Mueller report.While the testimony was belated and limited, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, portrayed it as important.“Mr. McGahn provided the committee with substantial new information,” Mr. Nadler said in a statement accompanying the transcript release. He added, “All told, Mr. McGahn’s testimony gives us a fresh look at how dangerously close President Trump brought us to, in Mr. McGahn’s words, the ‘point of no return.’”Mr. McGahn used that phrase when a staff lawyer for House Democrats grilled him at length about Mr. Trump’s efforts to get him to tell the deputy attorney general at the time, Rod J. Rosenstein, to remove Mr. Mueller over a dubious claim that the special counsel had a conflict of interest — which Mr. McGahn refused to do, believing it could “cause this to spiral out of control.”After Mr. Trump called him at home on a Saturday in 2017 to pressure him again to tell Mr. Rosenstein to oust Mr. Mueller, for example, Mr. McGahn testified, he was deeply concerned.“After I got off the phone with the president, how did I feel?” he said. “Oof. Frustrated, perturbed, trapped. Many emotions.”Fearing that conveying the directive might instead prompt Mr. Rosenstein to resign and touch off a crisis akin to President Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre during the Watergate scandal, Mr. McGahn instead prepared to resign if Mr. Trump did not relent. He told several colleagues at the White House about his intention, although not Mr. Trump himself. But the crisis instead blew over for a time.In his testimony, Mr. McGahn acknowledged that he was afraid that if Mr. Trump removed Mr. Mueller or otherwise interfered with the investigation, the action would be used to accuse the president of obstruction of justice. But he was also careful to frame his concerns as being about public relations, without acknowledging that any legal lines were ever crossed.“It didn’t mean the president was meddling, but certainly it would be easily made to look that way,” Mr. McGahn said.The internal furor over Mr. Trump’s previous attempt to oust Mr. Mueller reignited in January 2018, when The New York Times and then The Washington Post reported on the encounter.Mr. Trump was enraged and pushed Mr. McGahn to make a statement denying that the episode had happened, but he refused to do so — because, he said, The Times story was substantially accurate. (Mr. McGahn said that The Post’s follow-up to The Times story was clearer on one issue — whether he had conveyed his threat directly to Mr. Trump — because Mr. McGahn had been a source for The Post in order to explain that nuance.)Mr. McGahn had by then also already told Mr. Mueller’s team about the event — Mr. Trump had ordered him to cooperate with the special counsel — and he feared that Mr. Mueller would consider charging him with making a false statement to law enforcement officials if he contradicted his account.Mr. McGahn also called Mr. Trump’s claim that he never even suggested firing Mr. Mueller “disappointing,” because Mr. Trump “certainly entertained the idea. Certainly seemed to ask a number of people about it. Certainly had a number of conversations with me about something along those lines.”The fight over whether Mr. McGahn would falsely say that Mr. Trump had never asked him to have the special counsel removed by Mr. Rosenstein also led to a vivid moment in the Mueller report where Mr. Trump chastised Mr. McGahn for keeping notes of their conversations, saying it was not something that Roy M. Cohn — a notorious lawyer who was disbarred for unethical conduct, but who Mr. Trump admired — would have done. Cohn died in 1986.“I didn’t really respond,” Mr. McGahn said. “I’ve made my point. And this was not the first time that Roy Cohn has sort of — the ghost of Roy had come into the Oval Office, so it didn’t seem to be a point worth responding to and, you know, he’s the president, he gets the last word.” More

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      U.S. Put Gag Order on Times Executives Amid Fight Over Email Logs

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      A push by prosecutors to secretly seize data about four Times reporters’ emails began in the Trump administration and continued under Biden.WASHINGTON — In the last weeks of the Trump administration and continuing under President Biden, the Justice Department fought a secret legal battle to obtain the email logs of four New York Times reporters in a hunt for their sources, a top lawyer for the newspaper said Friday night.While the Trump administration never informed The Times about the effort, the Biden administration continued waging the fight this year, telling a handful of top Times executives about it but imposing a gag order to shield it from public view, said the lawyer, David McCraw, who called the move unprecedented.The gag order prevented the executives from disclosing the government’s efforts to seize the records even to the executive editor, Dean Baquet, and other newsroom leaders.Mr. McCraw said Friday that a federal court had lifted the order, which had been in effect since March 3, freeing him to reveal what had happened. The battle was over an effort by the Justice Department to seize email logs from Google, which operates the Times’s email system, and which had resisted the effort to obtain the information.The disclosure came two days after the Biden Justice Department notified the four reporters that the Trump administration, hunting for their sources, had in 2020 secretly seized months of their phone records from early 2017. That notification followed similar disclosures in recent weeks about seizing communications records of reporters at The Washington Post and CNN.Mr. Baquet condemned both the Trump and Biden administrations for their actions, portraying the effort as an assault on the First Amendment.“Clearly, Google did the right thing, but it should never have come to this,” Mr. Baquet said. “The Justice Department relentlessly pursued the identity of sources for coverage that was clearly in the public interest in the final 15 days of the Trump administration. And the Biden administration continued to pursue it. As I said before, it profoundly undermines press freedom.”There was no precedent, Mr. McCraw said, for the government to impose a gag order on New York Times personnel as part of a leak investigation. He also said there was no precedent for the government to seize the Times’s phone records without advance notification of the effort.A Google spokeswoman said that while it does not comment on specific cases, the company is “firmly committed to protecting our customers’ data and we have a long history of pushing to notify our customers about any legal requests.”Anthony Coley, a Justice Department spokesman, noted that “on multiple occasions in recent months,” the Biden-era department had moved to delay enforcement of the order and it then “voluntarily moved to withdraw the order before any records were produced.”He added: “The department strongly values a free and independent press, and is committed to upholding the First Amendment.”Last month, Mr. Biden said he would not permit the Justice Department during his administration to seize communications logs that could reveal reporters’ sources, calling the practice “simply, simply wrong.” (Under the Obama administration, the Justice Department had gone after such data in several leak investigations.)The letter this week disclosing the seizure of phone records involving the Times reporters — Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, Eric Lichtblau and Michael S. Schmidt — had hinted at the existence of the separate fight over data that would show whom they had been in contact with over email.The letters said the government had also acquired a court order to seize logs of their emails, but “no records were obtained,” providing no further details. But with the lifting of the gag order, Mr. McCraw said he had been freed to explain what had happened.Prosecutors in the office of the United States attorney in Washington had obtained a sealed court order from a magistrate judge on Jan. 5 requiring Google to secretly turn over the information. But Google resisted, apparently demanding that the Times be told, as its contract with the company requires.The Justice Department continued to press the request after the Biden administration took over, but in early March prosecutors relented and asked a judge to permit telling Mr. McCraw. But the disclosure to him came with a nondisclosure order preventing him from talking about it to other people.Mr. McCraw said it was “stunning” to receive an email from Google telling him what was going on. At first, he said, he did not know who the prosecutor was, and because the matter was sealed, there were no court documents he could access about it.The next day, Mr. McCraw said, he was told the name of the prosecutor — a career assistant United States attorney in Washington, Tejpal Chawla — and opened negotiations with him. Eventually, Mr. Chawla agreed to ask the judge to modify the gag order so Mr. McCraw could discuss the matter with the Times’s general counsel and the company’s outside lawyers, and then with two senior Times executives: A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher, and Meredith Kopit Levien, the chief executive.“We made clear that we intended to go to court to challenge the order if it was not withdrawn,” Mr. McCraw said. Then, on June 2, he said, the Justice Department told him it would ask the court to quash the order to Google at the same time that it disclosed the earlier phone records seizure, which he had not known about.He described the position he was in as “untenable,” especially when it came to talking with Times reporters about chatter involving some kind of fight involving Google and a leak investigation related to The Times.The Justice Department has not said what leak it was investigating, but the identity of the four reporters who were targeted and the date range of the communications sought strongly suggested that it centered on classified information in an April 2017 article about how James B. Comey Jr., the former F.B.I. director, handled politically charged investigations during the 2016 presidential campaign.The article included discussion of an email or memo by a Democratic operative that Russian hackers had stolen, but that was not among the tranche that intelligence officials say Russia provided to WikiLeaks for public disclosure as part of its hack-and-dump operation to manipulate the election.The American government found out about the memo, which was said to express confidence that the attorney general at the time, Loretta Lynch, would not let an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server go too far. Mr. Comey was said to worry that if Ms. Lynch made and announced the decision not to charge Ms. Clinton, Russia would put out the memo to make it seem illegitimate, leading to his unorthodox decision to announce that the F.B.I. was recommending against charges in the matter.The Justice Department under then-President Donald Trump, who fired Mr. Comey and considered him an enemy, sought for years to see whether it could find evidence sufficient to charge him with the crime of making unauthorized disclosures of classified information — a push that eventually came to focus on whether he had anything to do with The Times learning about the existence of the document Russian hackers had stolen.The long-running leak investigation into Mr. Comey was seen inside of the Justice Department as one of the most politicized and contentious, even by the standards of a department that had been prevailed upon in several instances to use leak investigations and other policies concerning book publication to attack former officials who criticized Mr. Trump.Throughout last year, prosecutors talked about whether or not to close the leak investigation into Mr. Comey, according to two people familiar with the case, in part because there seemed to be little evidence to show that the former FBI director had shared classified information with the press.Last fall, department officials discussed whether the investigation had run its course and prosecutors should draft a declination memo that would explain why Mr. Comey would not be prosecuted, one of the people said. But the F.B.I. and the career prosecutors working on the case wanted to keep the investigation open, the people said, and in January prosecutors obtained a special court order to require Google to turn over data on the reporters’ emails.With Mr. Trump soon to be out of office, the order was controversial among some inside of the department, according to two people with knowledge of the case. It was seen as unusually aggressive for a case that would likely end in no charges. During the transition from the Trump to the Biden administration, at least one official wrote in a memo that the case should be closed, according to a person familiar with the transition.In the court filings seeking to compel Google to turn over logs of who was communicating with the four reporters who wrote that story, the Justice Department persuaded the judge that the secrecy was justified because, as the judge wrote on Jan. 5, “there is reason to believe that notification of the existence of this order will seriously jeopardize the ongoing investigation, including by giving targets an opportunity to destroy or tamper with evidence.”The Jan. 5 document does not acknowledge that the existence of the leak investigation into Mr. Comey and its subject matter was by then already known, because The Times had reported on it almost a year earlier. It is not clear whether the Justice Department told the judge about that article, or instead suggested that the inquiry was still a well-kept secret. More

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      McGahn Breaks Little New Ground in Closed-Door Testimony

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      A transcript of the former White House counsel’s appearance, which ended a two-year dispute between the Justice Department and Congress over a subpoena, will be made public next week.WASHINGTON — Donald F. McGahn II, the former White House counsel, answered detailed questions from Congress behind closed doors on Friday about President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to impede the Russia investigation. But Mr. McGahn provided few new revelations, according to people familiar with his testimony.The fact that Mr. McGahn spoke to Congress at all was significant after a multiyear legal battle by the Trump Justice Department to block an April 2019 subpoena for his testimony. That dispute ended last month, when President Biden’s Justice Department, House Democrats and a lawyer for Mr. McGahn reached a compromise under which he finally showed up.Still, the interview by the House Judiciary Committee, attended by only a half dozen or so lawmakers on a summer Friday when Congress was on recess, was an anticlimactic conclusion to a saga that once dominated Capitol Hill. When Democrats first subpoenaed Mr. McGahn, they believed his testimony under oath and on live television could help build public support for impeaching Mr. Trump for obstruction of justice and other matters.Instead, in the time it took to sort out a tangled legal battle, questions about the events Mr. McGahn witnessed have largely faded into the background or been carefully detailed by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. Mr. Trump’s presidency turned up newer issues for which the House impeached him twice — and the Senate acquitted him both times.“I believe we have been vindicated in terms of the intimacy of his involvement and the ultimate conclusions of the Mueller report,” Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, Democrat of Texas, told reporters as she exited the session. “The Congress has to be respected with its subpoena and oversight responsibilities.“Today, we asserted that right,” she added.But under the strict limits imposed by the terms of the deal, Mr. McGahn’s appearance broke little new ground, according to those familiar with it, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it. The agreement limited questioning to matters that were described in the publicly available portions of Mr. Mueller’s report.Mr. McGahn will have up to a week to review a transcript for accuracy before it is made public. But the people said that he hewed closely to the account he had already given the special counsel, often telling committee lawyers that his recollections of events from four years ago were no longer sharp.Republicans were pleased to declare the interview a waste of time as they left the session after more than five hours of questioning.“Today, we have the House Democrats on the Judiciary Committee relitigating the Mueller report,” said Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee. “Don McGahn hasn’t been White House counsel for three years.”Mr. McGahn was a witness to many episodes described in the second volume of the Mueller report, which centered on potential obstruction of justice issues; his name appears there more than 500 times.In June 2017, for example, Mr. Trump called Mr. McGahn at home and ordered him to tell Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, to fire Mr. Mueller over a dubious claim that the special counsel had a conflict of interest. Mr. McGahn refused and was prepared to resign before Mr. Trump backed off, according to the Mueller report.After the report became public, Mr. Trump claimed on Twitter that he had never told Mr. McGahn to fire Mr. Mueller. Two people familiar with the hearing on Friday said that the session had spent a lengthy period going over that episode, and that Mr. McGahn had testified under oath that the account in Mr. Mueller’s report was accurate.The report also described a related episode that followed a January 2018 report by The New York Times that first brought to public light Mr. Trump’s failed attempt to have Mr. Mueller fired. Mr. Trump tried to bully Mr. McGahn into creating “a record stating he had not been ordered to have the special counsel removed” while also shaming the lawyer for taking notes about their conversations. But Mr. McGahn refused to write the memo.Mr. McGahn was also a major witness to several other episodes recounted in the obstruction volume of Mr. Mueller’s report, including the White House’s handling of the Justice Department’s concerns that Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, was vulnerable to blackmail by Russia over false statements he had made about his conversations with the country’s ambassador. Mr. McGahn was also part of deliberations leading to Mr. Trump’s firing of James B. Comey Jr., the F.B.I. director.Mr. Trump had directed Mr. McGahn to speak with Mr. Mueller’s investigators in 2017. In 2019, as it became clear that Mr. McGahn had become a chief witness to many of Mr. Trump’s actions that raised obstruction of justice concerns, the president’s allies — like his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani — began attacking him.The attacks left Mr. McGahn in a delicate position. He is a hero to the conservative legal movement because he was the chief architect of the Trump administration’s judicial selection process, which filled the federal bench with Federalist Society-style appointees. But Mr. McGahn’s law firm, Jones Day, has many Republican-oriented clients; if Mr. Trump were to order the party faithful to shun the firm as punishment, it could be financially devastating.Democrats were eager to claim Mr. McGahn’s testimony on Friday as a victory despite the lack of new disclosures, saying it upheld the principle that a White House could not prevent a key administration official from testifying before Congress. It added a second precedent to one created in 2009, when the new administration of President Barack Obama struck a deal to end litigation he had inherited over whether President George W. Bush’s former White House counsel, Harriet Miers, would testify about firings of United States attorneys.But because the compromise agreement to permit Mr. McGahn to testify effectively cut short the litigation, a federal appeals court never issued any binding precedent to resolve the long-running ambiguity over whether Congress can sue the executive branch in a subpoena dispute. That means the next time such a clash arises, Mr. Biden or a future president can again stonewall Congress and litigate the same issue all over again.Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said Mr. McGahn “shed new light on several troubling events today.” But the congressman also described the belated nature of the testimony as a mixed bag.“In one sense, today is a great victory for congressional oversight. By securing Mr. McGahn’s testimony, we have made clear that the executive branch must respect our subpoenas,” he said. “On the other hand, two years is clearly too long to wait to enforce a valid subpoena, and the Trump era has taught us that Congress can no longer depend on good-faith cooperation with our committees.”Mr. Nadler said he planned to advance legislation that would resolve legal disputes over subpoenas to executive branch officials more quickly. More

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      McGahn to Testify About Trump’s Efforts to Obstruct Russia Inquiry

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      President Donald J. Trump’s former White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, is set to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on Friday about whether Mr. Trump obstructed the Russia investigation, bringing to a close a long legal and political battle.The fact that Mr. McGahn is talking to Congress at all is significant after a multiyear legal battle by the Trump Justice Department to block a subpoena for his testimony. That dispute ended last month when the Biden Justice Department, House Democrats and a lawyer for Mr. McGahn reached a compromise.Under that deal, Mr. McGahn’s appearance may yield little in terms of new revelations. He will testify behind closed doors and will have up to a week to review a transcript for accuracy before it is made public. He also may be questioned only about his involvement in matters that are described in the publicly available portions of the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.Still, Mr. McGahn is likely to be asked to respond under oath to Mr. Trump’s public denial of events that were described in the report based in part on what Mr. McGahn told Mr. Mueller’s investigators, including that Mr. Trump had ordered him to have Mr. Mueller fired — a step Mr. McGahn said he refused to take.Congress is out of session this week, and members must be physically present to participate, so the full committee is not expected to attend. While those who do will have the right to ask questions, Mr. McGahn is expected to be questioned primarily by committee staffers. He will be accompanied by his lawyer, William A. Burck. More

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      Robert Mueller will take law students behind the decision-making process of the Russia inquiry.

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      Robert S. Mueller III will teach a course at the University of Virginia’s law school intended to take students inside his investigation that concluded Russia had interfered in the 2016 election to help Donald J. Trump, the university announced on Wednesday.The course, called “The Mueller Report and the Role of the Special Counsel,” will be taught by Mr. Mueller alongside three former federal prosecutors: James L. Quarles III, Andrew D. Goldstein and Aaron Zebley, who was Mr. Mueller’s deputy. Mr. Mueller recruited the three men to work on the investigation, which spanned two years of the Trump administration.Mr. Mueller will lead at least one of six in-person classes and said that he hoped to bring in other top prosecutors as guest speakers, according to the university.The course will cover the investigation chronologically, from the hiring of Mr. Mueller as special counsel in 2017 until the inquiry’s conclusion in 2019. The instructors also intend to explain the challenges that prosecutors faced and “the legal and practical context” behind critical decisions, the university said.The final class is expected to focus on obstruction of justice and the role of special counsels in presidential accountability. The Mueller report detailed actions by Mr. Trump that many legal experts said were sufficient to ask a grand jury to indict him on charges of obstruction of justice, but Attorney General William P. Barr cleared him of obstruction soon after the report was completed.The announcement of the course is likely to revive curiosity around the Russian inquiry, which Mr. Trump repeatedly derided as a “witch hunt” and of which Mr. Mueller has seldom spoken publicly. He was a reluctant witness during a closely watched congressional hearing in July 2019, where he testified for nearly seven hours, giving many clipped answers and largely not straying from his report’s conclusions.Last summer, Mr. Mueller wrote an opinion essay for The Washington Post the day after Mr. Trump commuted the prison sentence of his longtime friend Roger J. Stone Jr., a political operative. In the essay, Mr. Mueller defended the prosecution of Mr. Stone for federal crimes as part of the Russia inquiry.“We made every decision in Stone’s case, as in all our cases, based solely on the facts and the law and in accordance with the rule of law,” Mr. Mueller wrote.Mr. Zebley told the University of Virginia that the course instructors would rely on public records to explain the path of the investigation.After the inquiry ended, Mr. Mueller, Mr. Zebley and Mr. Quarles left the Justice Department and returned to the private law firm WilmerHale in Washington, where they are partners. Mr. Goldstein is now a partner at the firm Cooley in Washington. Mr. Mueller and Mr. Zebley are both alumni of the University of Virginia’s law school.All four lawyers had notable careers at the Justice Department and said they were looking forward to sharing those experiences with students, according to the university.“I look forward to engaging with the students this fall,” Mr. Mueller said. More

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      in Elections

      Prosecutors Investigating Whether Ukrainians Meddled in 2020 Election

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      The Brooklyn federal inquiry has examined whether former and current Ukrainian officials tried to interfere in the election, including funneling misleading information through Rudolph W. Giuliani.Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have been investigating whether several Ukrainian officials helped orchestrate a wide-ranging plan to meddle in the 2020 presidential campaign, including using Rudolph W. Giuliani to spread their misleading claims about President Biden and tilt the election in Donald J. Trump’s favor, according to people with knowledge of the matter. More

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      Justice Dept. Fights to Keep Secret a Memo on Clearing Trump in Russia Inquiry

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      The move put the Biden administration in the position of defending the secrecy of a memo related to the disputed decision to clear President Donald J. Trump.WASHINGTON — The Biden administration has decided to fight a legal battle to keep secret most of a Trump-era Justice Department memo related to Attorney General William P. Barr’s much-disputed declaration in 2019 that cleared President Donald J. Trump of illegally obstructing justice in the Russia investigation.In a late-night filing on Monday, the Justice Department appealed part of a scathing district court ruling that ordered it to make public the entire memo. Two senior department officials wrote the document at the same time that they were helping Mr. Barr draft a letter to Congress claiming that the evidence in the report, which was still secret at the time, was insufficient to charge Mr. Trump with a crime.The still-redacted portion of the document examines nearly a dozen episodes presented as raising obstruction of justice concerns that were detailed in the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and has at least two sections, according to two people briefed on it.One laid out potential legal theories under which Mr. Trump could have been prosecuted, the people said. The other examined whether the evidence for any of the episodes constituted proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The memo is said to conclude that no charge was viable.The decision to keep hiding that analysis from public scrutiny puts the Biden administration in the politically awkward position of trying to cover up a record that would shed new light on an act by Mr. Barr that Democrats consider notorious. But it also enables the department to defend two institutional interests: its ability to keep internal legal analysis secret and the actions of career officials whom a judge accused of misleading the court.The Justice Department did release the first page and a half of the nine-page memo. While Mr. Mueller had declined to render a judgment about whether to prosecute Mr. Trump because the department’s policy was not to charge a sitting president, the memo said that Mr. Barr should offer his opinion of the evidence to shape public understanding of the report.“Although the special counsel recognized the unfairness of levying an accusation against the president without bringing criminal charges, the report’s failure to take a position on the matters described therein might be read to imply such an accusation if the confidential report were released to the public,” wrote Steven A. Engel and Edward C. O’Callaghan, two senior Justice Department officials during the Trump administration.The department also consented to releasing additional portions of the ruling this month by Judge Amy Berman Jackson, in which she had labeled its previous filings to her about the memo as “disingenuous.” Portions of her ruling that discussed the first part of the memo had been redacted.The court on Tuesday unsealed a more fulsome version of the ruling. It revealed that Judge Jackson had also accused the department of having “deliberately obscured” material in the memo that contradicted the notion that Mr. Barr needed to offer a public opinion about the prosecutorial merit of the evidence amassed by Mr. Mueller. The exercise, she said, was instead “purely hypothetical” and fundamentally about “getting a jump on public relations.”Noting that she had discovered the existence of this first part of the memo only after she insisted on reading it for herself rather than relying on the department’s representations about it, Judge Jackson also wrote: “D.O.J. made a strategic decision to pretend as if the first portion of the memorandum was not there and to avoid acknowledging that what the writers were actually discussing was how to neutralize the impact of the report in the court of public opinion.”The new Justice Department filing apologized for — but also defended — its Barr-era assertions to the court about the memo. It said that department officials could have been clearer, but that they were nevertheless accurate on the central legal question: whether the nature of the memo was pre-decisional and deliberative and thus exempt from disclosure. Any missteps, it argued, did not warrant releasing the entire document.Mr. Barr’s claim that the evidence did not show that Mr. Trump had committed any chargeable crime of obstruction has been widely criticized as deeply misleading. Among other fallout, a government watchdog group, CREW, filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in the United States District Court in Washington seeking disclosure materials about the matter, leading to the fight over the memo.The Mueller report itself — which Mr. Barr permitted to become public weeks after his letter to Congress created an impression that the fruits of the inquiry had cleared Mr. Trump of obstruction — detailed several actions by Mr. Trump that many legal specialists say were sufficient to ask a grand jury to indict him on charges of obstruction of justice.Those actions included Mr. Trump’s attempt to bully his White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, into putting out a statement or writing a memo that would falsely deny that the president had directed him to fire Mr. Mueller — effectively falsifying evidence that would have contradicted Mr. McGahn’s witness testimony about that event.Mr. McGahn, who refused to relay directions to remove Mr. Mueller and to later falsely deny that episode, according to the Mueller report, will privately testify next week before the House Judiciary Committee about such matters.Mr. Trump’s actions also included dangling a potential pardon to his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, to encourage him not to cooperate with investigators.Mr. Trump later pardoned Mr. Manafort, who had refused to cooperate with Mr. Mueller about certain key matters.Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in May 2019, Mr. Barr offered some explanations for why he did not think charges were merited for a few of the 10 episodes that the Mueller report had recounted as raising obstruction concerns. One of the people said that testimony drew upon and dovetailed with the still-hidden portions of the memo.“We took each of the 10 episodes, and we assessed them against the analytical framework that had been set forth by the special counsel,” Mr. Barr said at the time. “And we concluded that the evidence developed during the special counsel’s investigation was not sufficient to establish that the president committed an obstruction of justice offense.”For example, several episodes centered on Mr. Trump’s use, or attempted use, of his power to remove subordinate officials in the executive branch. They included his firing in 2017 of the F.BI. director James B. Comey Jr. — the act that led to Mr. Mueller’s appointment — and his unsuccessful efforts to persuade subordinates to have Mr. Mueller fired.Mr. Barr testified that “as a matter of law,” the obstruction statutes enacted by Congress did not limit the president’s power to remove a special counsel.That view, which is contested, comports with his own sweeping theory of presidential power. Still, in the deliberations, department officials also focused on the lack of historical precedent for prosecuting a current or former president for firing a subordinate, the two people said.In his testimony, Mr. Barr also maintained that the evidence was insufficient to prove that Mr. Trump had deliberately sought to criminally obstruct the investigation, apart from legal theories.For example, Mr. Barr said, a major reason that Mr. Trump fired Mr. Comey was his “refusal to tell the public what he was privately telling the president, which was that the president was not under investigation.” Mr. Trump’s rationale for trying to fire Mr. Mueller was a purported conflict of interest, and had Mr. Trump succeeded, Mr. Barr said, a replacement would “presumably” have been appointed.But the Trump Justice Department never made public its comprehensive analysis of all the episodes the Mueller report laid out. That is the analysis the Biden administration is seeking to keep secret.Judge Jackson had given the department until Monday night to respond to her order to disclose the memo — and, by extension, her finding that officials had been “disingenuous to this court” about its nature in court filings by arguing that it could be lawfully kept secret.In addition to officials omitting the existence of the first part of the memo in descriptions of it that were submitted to her, Judge Jackson also blasted the characterization of the document as pre-decisional. Mr. Barr, she wrote, had already decided not to initiate any prosecution of Mr. Trump when the memo was written, and it was instead about strategy and arguments that could be mustered to support that decision.In its filing, the Biden Justice Department said that the previous filings “could have been clearer, and it deeply regrets the confusion that caused.” But it also insisted that the department’s “declarations and briefs were accurate and submitted in good faith.”The department also put forward a narrow view of the problems with its previous statements about the memo, focusing on imprecision about whether Mr. Barr had been considering whether to commence a prosecution of Mr. Trump at that moment — as it had suggested in some places — or whether he was opining on whether Mr. Trump could be charged after he left office.Although Mr. Engel and Mr. O’Callaghan completed the memo after Mr. Barr had decided to say the evidence would not support obstruction charges, the department argued that the legal analysis portion of the memo memorialized advice they had provided before Mr. Barr made that decision.“The government acknowledges that its briefs could have been clearer, and it deeply regrets the confusion that caused,” the Biden Justice Department’s filing said. “But the government’s counsel and declarants did not intend to mislead the court, and the government respectfully submits” that any missteps still did not warrant releasing the entire memo.Katie Benner More