The Inside Story of the Mueller Probe's Mistakes In a new book, Andrew Weissmann
The Inside Story of the Mueller Probe’s Mistakes:
In a new book, Andrew Weissmann, one of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s top deputies, lays out the limits and letdowns of the years-long Russia investigation.
https://www.theatlantic.com/
Andrew Weissmann was one of Robert Mueller’s top deputies in the special counsel’s investigation of the 2016 election, and he’s about to publish the first insider account, called Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation.
"The Special Counsel’s Office also worked under the constant threat that Trump would fire Mueller, as Richard Nixon had fired Archibald Cox, the first Watergate special prosecutor, in the Saturday Night Massacre. Trump tried several times to get rid of Mueller, but he was stopped by his underlings, who knew that it would lead to legal and political disaster. Still, the threat never went away, and in the end, it served the president’s interests well: “The specter of our being shut down exerted a kind of destabilizing pull on our decision-making process.” Where Law Ends describes numerous instances, large and small, when Mueller declined to pursue an aggressive course for fear of the reaction at the White House."
"Had we given it our all—had we used all available tools to uncover the truth, undeterred by the onslaught of the president’s unique powers to undermine our efforts?” Weissmann writes in the introduction. “I know the hard answer to that simple question: We could have done more.” Elsewhere, he admits that, “like Congress, we were guilty of not pressing as hard as we could” for evidence. He calls a crucial passage of the Mueller report “mealymouthed”—an easy mark for Barr’s treachery. “Part of the reason the president and his enablers were able to spin the report was that we had left the playing field open for them to do so.”
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