8 He was forced to rely on trying to turn key witnesses such as Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Manafort’s deputy Rick Gates to break the case rather than using contemporary testimony and documents. 7 The bureau largely failed to investigate Trump despite believing it had evidence that merited a vigorous investigation into him and his campaign.Īs a result, when Mueller took over the investigation in May 2017, he had to uncover a conspiracy almost exclusively after the fact. The FBI was guilty of the same sin as the Obama administration: Both assumed that Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 election and thus failed to respond to Russian aggression with appropriate urgency. 6 However, this limited focus obscures the Horowitz report’s major finding that the FBI was so intent on keeping its investigation secret that it failed to do very much at all. 4 Discussion of the Horowitz report has largely centered on his conclusion that the FBI did not illegally spy on Trump’s campaign 5 but did cut corners in obtaining warrants on Trump-associated individuals under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on the Russia investigation, released in December 2019, demonstrates that this was not the case. 3 Yet in doing so, the president’s critics helped give credence to the myth that the FBI was vigorously pursuing him in 2016.

Trump’s critics have rallied behind officials such as Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, and Lisa Page-hardworking career officials whom the president has viciously attacked merely for trying to do their jobs. Trump’s attacks on the intelligence community have in some ways immunized the FBI from public scrutiny of its actual failings. Simply put, the FBI failed in its core mission to protect and defend the United States. Far from revealing a “witch hunt” against Trump, reviews of the investigation reveal that there was barely a hunt at all. In the year since the report’s release, it has become clear that the Mueller investigation was hamstrung from the start. The Mueller report failed to meet these expectations not because there was no more information to find, but because the FBI botched the Russia investigation in 2016. 2 Mueller’s report also left people who were closely following the investigation underwhelmed by the lack of new information as well as by the many questions and topics the report failed to answer or address. Attorney General William Barr to mislead the public, House Democrats’ reticence to impeach Trump, and Mueller’s decision not to render a “traditional prosecutorial judgment” left the public unsure of what Mueller actually uncovered. 1 Yet deliberate efforts by the president and U.S. Mueller’s report is arguably the most damning document ever written about a sitting president, identifying numerous instances of obstruction of justice and clear collusion between President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia. Just more than one year after special counsel Robert Mueller released his report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, the country remains confused about what happened.

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