Andrew D. Goldstein is one of Robert Mueller’s lead prosecutors in the obstruction of justice investigation of the president. Credit: Tom Brenner, The New York Times
WASHINGTON — The routine was always the same. President Trump’s lawyers would drive to heavily secured offices near the National Mall, surrender their cellphones, head into a windowless conference room and resume tense negotiations over whether the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, would interview Mr. Trump.
But Mr. Mueller was not always there. Instead, the lawyers tangled with a team of prosecutors, including a little known but formidable adversary: Andrew D. Goldstein, 44, a former Time magazine reporter who is now a lead prosecutor for Mr. Mueller in the investigation into whether the president obstructed justice.
Mr. Mueller is often portrayed as the omnipotent fact-gatherer, but it is Mr. Goldstein who has a much more involved, day-to-day role in one of the central lines of investigation.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller may soon be wrapping up his Russia investigation, according to multiple reports. Or, he may not be. No one really knows, and conflicting reports all appear to be coming from sources outside of Mueller’s tight-lipped team, giving independent commentators little hope of discerning their accuracy.
But as many have begun to expect the end of the investigation, observers have are starting to reflect on what we have learned so far. And opinions vary wildly.
Some are convinced Mueller has already come up empty. Some believe he may be on the cusp of something big, but he may struggle to prove it. Others are sure that new, devastating revelations are just around the corner. Some think that the special counsel had shown serious problems around the Trump campaign but nothing that could possibly warrant impeachment of the president. Many of Trump’s conservative defenders think Mueller has gotten desperate and is only charging people with “process crimes” because he couldn’t find anything more serious. And yet another group says that while worse may be coming, what we already know amounts to a damning imputation of Trump and his allies.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) Credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images
WASHINGTON — A top House Democrat threatened on Sunday to call special counsel Robert Mueller to Capitol Hill, subpoena documents and sue the Trump administration if the full report on Mueller’s Russia investigation is not made public.
Rep. Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said his committee will keep close watch on new Attorney General William Barr to see if he were “to try to bury any part of this report.” Schiff, D-Calif., also pledged to “take it to court if necessary.”
He said anything less than complete disclosure would leave Barr, who now oversees the investigation, with “a tarnished legacy.”
Demands are growing for special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report to be made public, with lawmakers and legal experts raising concerns about how and when that could happen.
On Sunday, Democrats including one 2020 presidential candidate framed the conclusion of Mueller’s nearly two-year investigation as a crucial moment for transparency. The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee pledged to subpoena the report on Russia’s election interference if necessary in order to make it public, while at least one legal expert suggested the path to making the report available to the public might be “circuitous.”
“This is an extraordinary moment in terms of the need that the special counsel has to investigate the conduct of the president of the United States’s campaign and issues surrounding it,” Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) said on CNN’s “Inside Politics.”
Special counsel Robert Mueller says in a new filing that he’s not taking a position on how much time Paul Manafort should spend in prison for charges in Washington, D.C., but told the judge presiding over his case that he doesn’t deserve leniency.
“Nothing about Manafort’s upbringing, schooling, legal education, or family and financial circumstances mitigates his criminality,” Mueller said in a heavily redacted sentencing memo released Saturday, which details Manafort’s crimes.
In the document, originally filed under seal on Friday night, Mueller said that the onetime Trump campaign chairman agreed in his plea deal that anything less than the government’s 17.5 to 22-year estimated sentence is not warranted.
The White House is bracing for Robert Mueller’s report, which the special counsel investigating President Trump’s campaign and Russia could submit to the Department of Justice as early as next week.
The filing would potentially bring to a close one of the dominant threads of Trump’s time in office, which he refers to as a “witch hunt.”
The president and his allies for months have called for an end to the special counsel’s investigation, and Trump, who often insists there was “no collusion” between his campaign and Russia, could benefit politically if the report vindicates him.
The FBI indictment of former Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone contains the unsurprising revelation that Stone threatened an associate, and his pet dog, to prevent him from cooperating with authorities. He expressed his threat using the familiar trope of the Mafia movie. “On multiple occasions,” the special counsel reports, Stone told his associate (reportedly Randy Credico) to “do a ‘Frank Pentangeli,’” a reference to a Godfather: Part II capo who was prepared to inform on the boss before Congress, before recanting his testimony (and ultimately committing suicide to protect his family from reprisal.)
The Russia scandal has provided us with relatively few Russia cultural references, but a proliferation of mafia references. The fact that Stone expressed himself this way is not mere color, nor is organized crime even a metaphor for the mindset and Trump and his inner circle. It is actually a reasonably literal description of the Trump organization.
In the fall of 2017, a source close to the administration warned, “this investigation is a classic Gambino-style roll-up. You have to anticipate this roll-up will reach everyone in this administration.” This turned out to be one of the most prescient descriptions of what was to come. A roll-up of an organized crime family generally starts at the bottom, and uses evidence against lower-ranking figures to compel testimony against their superiors, until it ultimately reaches the top of the organization. Mueller has followed this pattern, beginning with indictments against low-level characters like George Papadopoulos and Russian hackers, and working its way up to the inner circle of the campaign and, quite likely, the boss himself.
For starters, they have jurisdiction over the president’s political operation and businesses — subjects that executive privilege doesn’t cover.
Even as speculation mounts that special counsel Robert Mueller might be winding down his investigation, a parallel threat to President Donald Trump only seems to be growing within his own Justice Department: the Southern District of New York.
Manhattan-based federal prosecutors can challenge Trump in ways Mueller can’t. They have jurisdiction over the president’s political operation and businesses — subjects that aren’t protected by executive privilege, a tool Trump is considering invoking to block portions of Mueller’s report. From a PR perspective, Trump has been unable to run the same playbook on SDNY that he’s used to erode conservatives’ faith in Mueller, the former George W. Bush-appointed FBI director. Legal circles are also buzzing over whether SDNY might buck DOJ guidance and seek to indict a sitting president.
The threat was highlighted when SDNY prosecutors ordered officials from Trump’s inaugural committee to hand over donor and financial records. It was the latest aggressive move from an office that has launched investigations into the president’s company, former lawyer and campaign finance practices. New York prosecutors have even implicated Trump in a crime.
William Barr was sworn in as President Trump’s second attorney general on Thursday, putting a new face atop the Justice Department who will assume oversight of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
The Senate confirmed Barr in a largely party-line vote amid intense speculation that Mueller’s probe into links between the Trump campaign and Russia is wrapping up.
The investigation — and Barr’s oversight of it — is likely to dominate his first weeks and possibly months as attorney general, depending on when Mueller submits his final report.
A spokesman for Kaiser confirmed she is fully cooperating with Mueller, according to the Guardian, and that she is working with separate “US congressional and legal investigations into the company’s activities.”
Kaiser is the second person from Cambridge Analytica who has been subpoenaed by Mueller. As the Guardian notes:
Demands are growing for special counsel 
