INTERFERENCE

Prosecutors meticulously correct the record on Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

The authors, who worked under special counsel Robert S. Mueller III during his high-profile federal investigation, aim to clear up lingering “confusion” about their findings. Recognizing that portions of the 448-page report they completed in March 2019 were “not as clear as we had hoped,” they don’t equivocate: “It is beyond dispute that the Russians interfered in the 2016 election to support [Donald] Trump,” using social media and emails stolen from Democratic Party computers in an effort to boost Trump and villainize his opponent, Hillary Clinton. There’s no way to measure “the effect, if any,” this had on the result, yet “it is undeniable” that Trump’s campaign “organized a press strategy” based on information pilfered and released by Russian military hackers. The authors argue that persistent misinterpretations of their findings stem from statements that William Barr, Trump’s attorney general, made after Mueller filed his report. Mueller cited multiple “episodes” in which Trump potentially obstructed justice. But because the Justice Department holds that Congress, not prosecutors, must decide whether to allege wrongdoing on the part of a sitting president, Mueller declined to make a “traditional prosecutorial determination” on charging Trump. Crucially, Mueller’s report is neither a criminal indictment of Trump nor an exoneration. Barr, however, declined for weeks to publish “our analysis and our words” on potential obstruction, instead releasing his own “inaccurate and incomplete” summary, which omitted Russia’s backing of Trump and wrongly stated that Mueller’s report “identifies no actions” by Trump that “constitute obstructive conduct.” This “fundamentally undermined” the report’s conclusions “and made it more difficult” for citizens to understand what Mueller, in a preface, calls Russia’s “multiple, systematic attacks” on democracy. With another election drawing near, “Russia is interfering again,” the authors write, declining, alas, to elaborate.

An essential account of Russia’s ongoing attempts to disrupt American elections.