By now, few American elected leaders dispute that elements of the Russian state meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election -- though President Donald Trump has continued to say it "could have been a lot of different groups." What remains unknown, or at least unproven, is whether anybody from Trump’s winning campaign assisted in that meddling. As Trump dismisses talk of collusion as "a total hoax," a wide-ranging criminal investigation continues. It’s produced one guilty plea and two indictments so far, but no proof yet of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.
1. What exactly did Russia do?
U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally ordered a campaign to undermine "public faith in the U.S. democratic process" and the candidacy of Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, and that along the way, Putin and his government "developed a clear preference" for Trump. Russia’s efforts included hacking and leaking emails that undermined Clinton’s campaign, and using phony accounts and advertising on Facebook and Twitter to sway American public opinion.
2. What’s still not known?
What if anything Trump or his team did to solicit, encourage or participate in Russia’s effort. Did anybody from the campaign’s digital team, for instance, help Russia target voters with fake news? (Absolutely not, says the director of that effort.) A former Trump foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos, did admit pursuing "dirt" on Clinton through people he understood to be connected to the Russian government. (Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to telling investigators, falsely, that he wasn’t yet on Trump’s campaign when he took those steps.) Then there’s the 35-page “dossier” alleging Russia has been "cultivating, supporting and assisting” Trump for at least five years and fed his campaign “valuable intelligence” on Clinton. Its major allegations -- compiled by a former British spy at the behest of the Clinton campaign -- remain unsubstantiated, and Trump has dismissed them as "a complete fraud."
3. Who is investigating?
Robert Mueller, a former FBI director, was called back into service as special counsel to oversee the probe. He was appointed on May 17 by Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, who cited the "unique circumstances" of the case. (It was Rosenstein’s call because Attorney General Jeff Sessions, his boss, recused himself, a move that bothered Trump.) Eight days before the appointment, Trump had fired the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, James Comey, who’d been a key player in the investigation.
4. Why did Trump fire Comey?
Trump’s dismissal of Comey in the midst of the Russia probe is at the heart of allegations that Trump might have obstructed justice. Trump said he considered "this Russia thing," which he called a "made-up story." The New York Times reported that months before being fired, Comey wrote a memo describing how Trump had personally asked him to shut down the investigation of Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn. The White House called that "not a truthful or accurate portrayal of the conversation."
5. How did this all begin?
In April 2016, Democratic Party leaders called in a cybersecurity firm to look at suspicious software on their computers. The firm said it found digital footprints of hackers tied to the Russian government. The Democratic National Committee went public with the news and the suspicion of Russian involvement in June, just after Clinton clinched the party’s nomination for president, and just after WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange said his group had "upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton."
6. What were those leaks?
WikiLeaks released almost 20,000 emails from inside the Democratic National Committee that showed, among other things, how DNC staffers had favored Clinton during her primary campaign against Bernie Sanders -- prompting Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign as DNC head. Later in the campaign, WikiLeaks released tens of thousands of emails from the Gmail account of John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman.
7. And WikiLeaks got those emails from Russia?
That’s the allegation. The report by U.S. intelligence agencies says Russia’s General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU, gave the material to WikiLeaks through an intermediary. Some of the emails also were released through the "persona" of a purported Romanian hacker, Guccifer 2.0, and a website, DCLeaks.com, both of which promoted the hacked information to certain journalists. Assange has said the source of the hacked emails "is not the Russian government and it is not a state party," though that doesn’t mean that an intermediary couldn’t have done so.
8. Which Trump aides are under scrutiny?
Potentially any who had contact with Russian representatives or intermediaries during the presidential campaign. That list includes:
Paul Manafort, Trump’s onetime campaign chairman. Along with his business partner, Rick Gates, Manafort was charged on Oct. 30 with money laundering, conspiracy and tax charges in a 12-count indictment. Manafort received $17.1 million for his work with Ukraine’s pro-Russian Party of Regions in 2012-2013 and, according to the Times, was once in debt to pro-Russia interests by as much as $17 million. The indictment says he laundered more than $18 million to support a “lavish lifestyle” and defrauded financial institutions that loaned him money.
Flynn, Trump’s national security adviser for just 24 days, who, in the words of former acting Attorney General Sally Yates, "compromised" himself -- made himself vulnerable to being blackmailed -- by lying about the contents of a December 2016 phone call with Sergey Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador to the U.S.
Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr., who met in June 2016 with a Russian lawyer offering potentially damaging information on Clinton.
Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and top assistant, who also attended the June 2016 meeting; confirmed four contacts with Russians during the campaign and White House transition; and, after Trump’s victory, discussed creating a secret line of communication between the Trump transition and the Russian government. (He denies any "improper contacts.")
Carter Page, a U.S. energy consultant once listed by Trump as a foreign policy adviser, whose July 2016 visit to Moscow drew the FBI’s interest.
Roger Stone, a longtime Republican operative, who dropped hints during the campaign that he had advance knowledge of the release of hacked campaign material.
9. Is Trump himself being investigated?
He keeps saying no, though most indications point to yes. Comey, whom Trump fired on May 9, said he assured Trump three times that he wasn’t personally the target of a counterintelligence case. But in firing Comey, Trump appears to have opened himself up to allegations of obstruction of justice, now being investigated by Mueller, the special counsel. Plus, as the indictment of Manafort shows, Mueller isn’t limiting his investigation to the 2016 campaign. Bloomberg News reported on July 20 that the broad probe includes Russian purchases of apartments in Trump buildings, Trump’s involvement in a controversial SoHo development in New York with Russian associates, the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow and Trump’s sale of a Florida mansion to a Russian oligarch in 2008.
10. Is Mueller allowed to look beyond the Russia question?
The Justice Department’s May 17 order to Mueller instructs him to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign,” as well as -- and this is key -- “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation." Trump and his lawyer, John Dowd, say that digging into matters beyond Russia and the 2016 election is out of bounds.
11. Does Trump acknowledge Russian meddling in the election?
He’s given mixed signals. He dismissed such reports during the campaign, theorizing that Democrats could just as easily have been hacked by "somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds." His first chief of staff, Reince Priebus, said in January that Trump was “not denying that entities in Russia were behind" the hackings. But since then Trump has called the concern about Russian involvement "fake news put out by the media," a "ruse" and a "scam." Over the weekend, Trump tweeted that investigators should focus on Democrats paying for the "fake dossier," rather than on the "phony Trump/Russia ‘collusion,’ which doesn’t exist."
What’s in the indictment of Manafort and Gates.
A deep dive into Manafort’s lucrative Ukraine years.
Manafort’s indictment doesn’t implicate Trump, a Bloomberg View editorial says.
But it should worry him, writes Bloomberg View executive editor Timothy L. O’Brien.
QuickTake Q&As on impeachment, obstruction of justice and the early murmurs about pardons.
What comes next.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller unfurled his first federal indictment Monday in his probe of possible collusion among Donald Trump, his presidential campaign and Russia, filing federal fraud charges against Paul Manafort -- Trump's former campaign manager and a globe-trotting political consultant whose business came to include work for allies of the Kremlin.
Manafort and one of his business associates, Rick Gates, are accused in a 31-page indictment of a number of financial crimes that occurred between 2006 and 2016, including money laundering, tax fraud, failure to disclose payments from foreign companies and bank accounts, and failure to register as an agent of the Ukraine government. As the indictment outlines in withering detail, Manafort "conspired to defraud the United States." (Manafort and Gates have pleaded not guilty, according to CNN).
What the indictment doesn't do (at least not yet, since other charges against Manafort could be added later) is put the president of the United States in immediate legal peril. So to all of the Democrats, Trump critics and #ImpeachTrump fans joyously embracing the Manafort indictment as something of a reckoning, relax. You're just not there yet.
It's worth pointing out that Manafort's work for the Trump campaign isn't mentioned in the indictment, although statements he made during his three-month tenure as campaign chairman in 2016 are cited. In that context, Manafort's financial wheeling and dealing in Eastern Europe and the fun stuff he did with payments he apparently went out of his way to mask ($655,000 on landscaping! $849,000 on clothes!) don't yet intersect with the Oval Office.
Manafort is also someone Trump himself is probably not too concerned about. Yes, the indictment gives Mueller and his Justice Department team the leverage they need to squeeze Manafort for more juice on Trump that they don't already have, of course. But to the extent that any of that revolves around collusion with Russia to tip the 2016 campaign in Trump's favor, well, Trump is much less exposed. Collusion isn't a federal crime (though some campaign actions relating to collusion could be crimes). He also could withstand a collusion fight in the court of public opinion, particularly with his intensely committed base.
But Trump has other reasons to be concerned, because the Manafort indictment may offer a blueprint of the kind of charges Mueller may ultimately bring against Trump himself -- charges involving financial crimes such as money laundering and tax evasion, listed in painful detail for all the nation to see.
While Team Trump is pushing the idea that Manafort's shady dealings are his own problem, they also make him a model Trump associate. The president, never one to follow rules, has repeatedly gone into business with career criminals over the years, including guys like Felix Sater of the Bayrock Group. An immigrant to the U.S. from the former Soviet Union, Sater has organized crime ties and links to Russia, all of which is surely on Mueller's radar.
Mueller's pursuit of the money trail is likely what Trump fears the most in the Russia probe, not collusion. An investigation into his own financial and business history as well as the dealings of family members like Kushner -- and his three eldest children, Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric – are more threatening than anything else Mueller might be weighing.
Since before Trump was even inaugurated, son-in-law Jared Kushner has scrambled to arrange financing for his family's troubled skyscraper, 666 Fifth Avenue. His solicitations involved Chinese financiers, and he met with a prominent Russian banker during the same period (though he denies talking business with the Russian). Mueller is reportedly focused on Kushner as part of his investigation.
A barometer of how much all of this concerns Trump is, as always, Twitter. Trump has been pressing his case against the media and law enforcement on Twitter for more than a week, repeatedly trying to say they should shift the focus from him and Russia to "Crooked Hillary" and her web of nefarious deals.
In part, this is due to recent reporting that the infamous Steele dossier exploring Trump's possible Russian conflicts was funded by Democrats, a fact that was already known for about a year. Trump pounced on that news to suggest that the entire Russia probe sprang into existence because of the dossier and, ergo, was a "witch hunt" orchestrated by Democrats.
The Mueller indictment, as does most of the fact pattern surrounding the Russian probe, shreds the idea that the Steele dossier was the foundational document for law enforcement and intelligence agencies interested in Trump's intersections with Russia. Investigators are clearly exploring multiple tracks.
Trump (as well as loyalists like Roger Stone and Sebastian Gorka) also went into defensive overdrive on Twitter over the weekend, after CNN broke the news on Friday evening that Mueller was likely to file charges against someone in the Trump orbit.
That carried over into this morning, after news broke of the Manafort indictment:
It's useful to the president to try to bring the focus back on "collusion" and away from other subjects like "obstruction" or "fraud," but his Twitter feed wouldn't be on fire if he wasn't seriously worried. And the president may be fuming because when he stares at the Mueller indictment, he might be concerned that he's staring into a mirror.