“NUMEROUS LINKS”
Mueller was named by the Justice Department’s No. 2 official, Rod Rosenstein, to take over the Russia investigation.
The investigation, according to the report, unearthed “numerous links” between the Russian government and Trump’s campaign and said the president’s team “expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts,” referring to hacked Democratic emails.
Mueller, a longtime Republican, faced unremitting attacks by Trump and his allies on his integrity as they tried to discredit the investigation and the special counsel himself. Trump used social media, speeches and comments to news media to assail Mueller, accusing him of running a politically motivated, “rigged witch hunt,” going “rogue,” surrounding himself with “thugs” and having conflicts of interest.
“It’s all a big hoax,” Trump said in 2019.
“Absolutely, it was not a hoax,” Mueller told the congressional hearing, noting the numerous charges arising from the probe.
Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was convicted in 2018 on eight charges of financial wrongdoing and pleaded guilty to two others, receiving a 7-1/2-year prison sentence. Longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone was convicted in 2019 of seven counts of lying to Congress, obstruction and witness tampering and sentenced to more than three years in prison. Trump later used his executive clemency power to pardon them. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, entered a guilty plea to lying to the FBI. Trump also pardoned Flynn.
The Democratic-led House of Representatives at the time twice impeached Trump after Mueller had finished his work, though those actions did not grow out of the special counsel’s findings.
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