Russiagate. Weissmann, former prosecutor of Mueller's team reveals in a book: We could have done more

2020-09-22T06:07:55.077Z

The team led by Special Attorney Robert Mueller did not do everything they could to ascertain in Russiagate what happened in the 2016 election, for example, avoiding suing President Donald Trump for questioning and scrutinizing his finances lest he might fire. the investigators. Andrew Weissmann, former top prosecutor of the same team, writes in the book "Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation", out next week. This is the first report by an insider of the investigation into Russian interference in the US elections and the contacts between Moscow and the tycoon's campaign. "Did we use all available tools to uncover the truth, without fearing the attack of the president's unique powers to undermine our efforts? I know the difficult answer to this simple question: could we have done more," writes Weissmann, who is a registered Democrat. The former prosecutor speaks reverently of Mueller but says his mistrust made him unsuitable in some respects in leading a politically heated investigation. Among the details, Weissmann points out that the same account used to pay a porn star who claimed to have had an affair with the tycoon had received "payments linked to a Russian oligarch". The account was handled by Trump's then personal attorney, Michael Cohen, whose case Mueller passed on to the New York Prosecutor's Office. Another detail concerns the former head of the Trump election campaign, Paul Manafort, already convicted of various financial crimes. Investigations found that he had shared the campaign's internal poll data with his business partner, Konstantin Kilimnik, who turned out to be a Russian intelligence agent. "It would seem to require significant audacity, or even influence, for another nation to make such a request to a presidential candidate," writes the author of Kilimnik's request. "This made monumentally disconcerting what we did not know and still do not know today: why would Trump accept such a thing? Why would Trump accept this Russian proposal if the candidate had nothing in return from Russia?"