Where Law Ends

Robert Mueller

In May 2017, Robert Mueller led an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election which evaluated the effect of Russians exerting influence in the campaign of Donald Trump, and explored the possibility of obstruction of justice by the President and several of his staff. Former FBI director Mueller, acting as Special Counsel, put together a group of highly experienced prosecutors, and for the subsequent year and ten months, their investigation caused intense interest by the American public and diverse media until the highly anticipated publication of their report in April 2019.[1]

In Where Law Ends, Andrew Weissmann reveals what went on inside the investigation, including the internal team conflicts, difficult decisions, and mistakes made by the investigators. He also describes the stress caused by what he viewed as the efforts of President Trump and Attorney General William Barr to divert the direction of the investigation and ultimately mold the results of the published report to their own political ends.[1] In fact, on May 5, 2021, Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia accused Barr of "misleading her and Congress about advice he had received from top department officials on whether President Donald J. Trump should have been charged with obstructing the Russia investigation and ordered that a related memo be released." The judge noted "Barr's Justice Department's obfuscation appeared to be part of a pattern in which top officials like Mr. Barr were untruthful to Congress and the public about the investigation." Judge Jackson ruled that the memo she was allowed to read, which allegedly contained private advice from Justice Department lawyers about the investigation, would need to be released to the public, and that Barr already knew how he would rule on Trump's obstruction charges before he read the memo. Referring to the possibility that Barr would prosecute Trump on obstruction charges, Judge Jackson wrote, "The fact that he (Trump) would not be prosecuted was a given". Judge Jackson strongly implied that Attorney General Barr had already decided not to prosecute Trump before seeking legal advice on the investigation from Justice Department officials, and further that he did not use his brief reading of the Mueller Report as a basis for his decision.[2]

Writing in March 2020, during Trump's administration, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton referred to Attorney General Barr's public statements as “misleading” and said he had “grave concerns about the objectivity of the process” leading up to the release of Mueller's report to the public. He further wrote, “The Court cannot reconcile certain public representations made by Attorney General Barr with the findings in the Mueller Report,” and added “These circumstances generally, and Attorney General Barr’s lack of candor specifically, call into question Attorney General Barr’s credibility.”[3]

Weissmann places the reader inside the Department of Justice where the team made the decisions that most affected the outcome and impact of the special counsel's report, including whether to subpoena the president, whether he could be required to submit his taxes to expedite a full financial investigation, and whether to bring obstruction charges. Weismann also uncovers several of the president's actions that may have been considered obstruction including Trumps dangling of pardons, his numerous threats to discourage members of his staff to testify, and at least one attempt by Trump to have his White House Counsel Don McGahn shut down the investigation and fire Mueller, though McGahn refused to take this step, despite the President's attempts to deny that the conversation had ever taken place.[4][5] As noted later by Weissmann, Trump's promise to pardon those campaign aids who refused to give information about Trump's knowledge or participation in Russian interference was made good on December 22–23, 2020, when George Papadopoulos, Roger Stone, Alex van der Zwaan, and Manafort were pardoned at the end of Trump's term. Weissmann considered the act of pardoning individuals charged in crimes that were associated with Trump's own administration as a clear misuse of the presidential pardoning power.[6]

Weissmann also details the effects that President Trump himself had on the investigation, through his extending promises of pardons and his continuous threats to end the inquiry and fire Mueller. These actions caused the team to speed through the investigation without the security of knowing if it would have time to complete their task. Weissmann speculates whether Trump's failure to cooperate with the investigation prevented the team from obtaining the critical evidence that could link Trump to a conspiracy charge.

Ultimately, Where Law Ends is a saga of a tightly knit group of public servants following the rule of law, tasked with investigating a president determined to obstruct their path, using methods many considered of questionable legality.[1]

The book review website Book Marks rated initial reviews from three prestigious newspapers: The Washington Post's review was rated as "excellent", and both the New York Times and Manchester Guardian's as positive.[7]

A fourth review of the book, from the highly respected Atlantic magazine should be considered positive, but references Weissmann in the most scathing criticism of the Mueller team, quoting him in such statements as, “Part of the reason the president and his enablers were able to spin the (Mueller) report was that we had left the playing field open for them to do so” referring to a passage in the Mueller report as "mealymouthed". The reporter for the Atlantic article went further in describing the difficulties Weissmann's team faced due to the President's dangling of pardons, stating that "Manafort never stopped lying to Team M (Weismann's Manifort team). His lies were encouraged by the president, who made sympathetic noises about Manafort with the suggestion that stonewalling might earn him a pardon. Trump’s pardon power was an obstacle that the prosecutors didn’t anticipate and could never overcome." Trump's finally granting pardons or commuted sentences to the members of his staff convicted of crimes can be seen as a fulfillment of his implied promise to peddle favors to the members of his staff who remained silent or refused to implicate him in the Russian investigation.[8]

Flipping suspects

Paul Manafort, 2016

Yanukovych, 2010

The greatest criticism of Weissmann can be found in what many critics considered his excessive zeal in flipping suspects, sometimes ruining lives in the process. But in the case of Trump's 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort, the sole object of Weismann and his Team M's investigation, Weissmann found convincing evidence of tax fraud and tax evasion in Manafort's use of undeclared offshore accounts to hide a considerable portion of the 60 million he took in payment for working with a Russian backed Ukrainian oligarch and managing the election of a corrupt Ukrainian President. These two primary sources of Manafort's income in the Ukraine were Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch and industrialist with ties to Russian intelligence, and Victor Yanukovych a corrupt pro-Russian thug who Manafort helped elect President of the Ukraine in 2010. Shortly after the election, Yanukovych's opponent was imprisoned in a manner eerily reflective of Trump and his staff urging the imprisonment of his 2016 political opponent Hillary Clinton.[13] Only after obtaining evidence of widescale tax evasion through careful examination of Manafort's taxes, did Weissman attempt to flip Manafort into revealing more about his role in conspiring in the 2016 election campaign.[14]

Though not incontrovertible proof of his guilt, in September 2018, Manafort plead guilty to several felonies including most significantly one count of tax conspiracy against the US (18 U.S.C #371), one count of failing to file with the Foreign Agent's Registration Act (FARA) and one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice due to attempts to tamper with witnesses.[15][16] [8]

• The Case for Impeachment
• Dezinformatsia: Active Measures in Soviet Strategy
• Disinformation
• The KGB and Soviet Disinformation
• Timeline of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections and Timeline of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections (July 2016–election day)
• Trump: The Kremlin Candidate?
• Trump–Russia dossier