Either the day Robert Mueller was appointed or the following day, Attorney General Rod Rosenstein tells Mueller his investigation has limits.
Rosenstein orders Mueller to conduct a criminal investigation into Trump’s campaign, not a counterintelligence investigation into Donald Trump himself.
Following this order, Mueller is not allowed to look into Trump’s financial ties to Russia.
Law enforcement officials never fully investigated Mr. Trump’s own relationship with Russia, even though some career F.B.I. counterintelligence investigators thought his ties posed such a national security threat that they took the extraordinary step of opening an inquiry into them. Within days, the former deputy attorney general Rod J. Rosenstein curtailed the investigation without telling the bureau, all but ensuring it would go nowhere.
Michael J. Schmidt
The FBI is never informed that the special counsel investigation into Russian election interference will not include investigating Donald Trump himself.
“We opened this case in May 2017 because we had information that indicated a national security threat might exist, specifically a counterintelligence threat involving the president and Russia. I expected that issue and issues related to it would be fully examined by the special counsel team…
It was first and foremost a counterintelligence case. Could the president actually be the point of coordination between the campaign and the Russian government? Could the president actually be maintaining some sort of inappropriate relationship with our most significant adversary in the world?
Andrew McCabe, then acting director of the FBI
Rod Rosenstein was appointed by Donald Trump in February and took office on April 26. Information about his order to limit the investigation isn’t public until August 2020.
Some in the media were critical of Rosenstein’s appointment of Robert Mueller from day one.
Sessions’s recusal does not seem meaningful since we know that he took part in a White House meeting at which Trump demanded that James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, be fired. And Rosenstein himself is tainted.
He was also in that meeting and seems to have obeyed the president’s orders to gin up a memo making it appear as though Comey was being dismissed over the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails. The White House, in fact, tried to put the entire responsibility for Comey’s dismissal on Rosenstein, until Trump blurted out that he was motivated by the Russia inquiry and had decided to fire Comey before the meeting.
Andrew Rosenthal, New York Times
Sources
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/30/us/politics/trump-russia-justice-department.html?searchResultPosition=5
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/18/opinion/robert-mueller-special-counsel-trump-investigation.html?searchResultPosition=9
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