The Mueller Report, you will recall, said, “While this report does not conclude that [Trump] committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” But no charges were brought, and then-Attorney General Barr tried to bury it.
It’s in the news again because, “The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Wednesday released an unredacted version of a memo prepared for … Barr that he used to justify his decision to not indict then-President Trump after reviewing the Mueller report.” It took a lawsuit to get that memo, and the public is seeing it for the first time (see story here).
The main finding of the Mueller Report, and the focus of the memo, is “there was not sufficient evidence to charge anyone from the Trump campaign, or the president himself, with conspiring alongside members of the Russian government to interfere in the election,” The Hill said in its story on Wednesday, August 24, 2022.
That recalls the Trump Tower meeting on June 9, 2016 (details here), between Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, and several others. The public didn’t learn of this meeting until April 2017, and Donald Trump Jr. stated then it was about “adopting Russian orphans.”
It was and it wasn’t. Donald Trump Jr. acknowledged later the discussion focused on the Magnitsky Act, a U.S. law that sanctions foreign human rights violators by freezing their assets and prohibiting them from entering the U.S.
You can get a background on the Magnitsky Act at Wikipedia (here), but the definitive story of the law is the book “Freezing Order” by Bill Browder (get it here), the man who pushed for its passage in the U.S. and other countries.
Putin hates the Magnitsky Act so much he tried several times to have Browder, a British national, arrested by Interpol and extradited to Russia to stand trial on trumped-up charges times. (Russia accused him of taking $320 million that had disappeared, which of course he didn’t; by pinning its theft on him, the Russians hoped to get rid of him and simultaneously cover the tracks of the real thieves).
President Obama signed the Magnitsky Act into law on December 14, 2012. Two weeks later, on December 28, 2012, “Putin approved the Dima Yakovlev Law, prohibiting Russian children from being adopted by American citizens. The law was described by the BBC as ‘a reaction to the US Magnitsky Act’, which blacklisted high-ranking Russian officials.” (Quoted from Wikipedia here.)
Putin hated the Magnitsky Act because it threatened to cut him off from billions of dollars he pilfered from the Russian economy and stashed overseas. For him, that’s a very big deal, because the bulk of his massive stolen wealth is hidden outside Russia. And that Trump Tower meeting was a big deal, too.
That’s because Veselnitskaya isn’t some social worker concerned about orphans. If you read Browder’s book you’ll likely come away with the impression, as I did, that she’s Putin’s personal lawyer and fixer — which makes her the best-connected lawyer in Russia.
She was at Trump Tower to trade repeal of the Dima Yakovlev Law for repeal of the Magnitsky Act. Her pitch was the Russians would help Trump win the election if they could count on his help in unfreezing Putin’s stolen billions. In other words, you get Russian orphans in exchange for Putin getting his money back. Lots of money, huge sums of money, hidden in shell companies and under Russian oligarchs’ names.
Making an offer like that would require Putin’s personal approval, and would be conveyed only by someone he trusted who reported directly to him. There’s no other way something like this could happen in Russia. Because of the risks involved, it could only be approved and carried out at the highest level. And also keep in mind that Donald Trump Jr. could do nothing without his father’s knowledge and approval; this didn’t originate with the son.
Which brings me back to the Mueller Report, which failed to find collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia with respect to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The Russian orphans were real, not a cover story; they were part of the quid pro quo for what Putin wanted from America: Trading children for his money. The quid pro quo that Donald Trump Jr. asked for in the Trump Tower meeting was dirt on Hillary Clinton. As we now know, the Trump campaign got the Hillary Clinton emails from Russia.
The Mueller Report wouldn’t call it collusion, and when the report came out, Trump shouted “no collusion! no collusion!” But I’ll sure as hell call it collusion. Let me repeated: The Trump Tower meeting was about Putin’s billions. And if Putin could unfreeze that much money in frozen assets in exchange for Russian orphans, he’s the guy who should write a book called “The Art of the Deal.”