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Name: Where Law Ends
Rating: 4.3 (32 reviews)
Author: Andrew Weissmann

Andrew Weissmann

Inside the Mueller Investigation

4.3 (32 ratings)

32 mins

Topics

US Politics US Presidents Political Figures

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Where Law Ends
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What’s in it for me? Get an insider’s account of what it was like to be part of the Mueller investigation.

Chances are that you’ve heard of the Mueller investigation and the report that emerged from it. But many people are likely to have gotten the wrong impression about what was discovered during that investigation due to the way the report was initially presented to the public. This wasn’t accidental. As you’ll discover, burying the facts and findings of the 22-month investigation was intentional.

Andrew Weissmann was one of the lead investigators working alongside Robert Mueller, and he wants to set the record straight and make more people aware of what they uncovered. This includes letting the people know that the investigation didn’t absolve President Trump of anything.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how much Paul Manafort spent on gardening and clothing;
how the government failed to prepare for the 2020 election; and
how Attorney General William Barr misrepresented the Mueller report.

Andrew Weissmann had already had a storied career before working for the Special Counsel.

Andrew Weissmann’s path to the Special Counsel’s Office was a long journey that involved a stint as a federal prosecutor with the Eastern District of New York (EDNY) and 20 years working at the Department of Justice. During his time as an EDNY prosecutor in the 1990s, he’d handled cases involving the city’s notorious crime families. This included the prosecution of Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, of the Genovese crime family, and John Gotti, the head of the Gambino family.

Weissmann then moved on to another landmark case by being part of the Enron Task Force, which brought to light one of the most egregious cases of corporate fraud in US history. Little did he know at the time that these cases would serve as good training for what was to come his way in 2017.

The key message here is: Andrew Weissmann had already had a storied career before working for the Special Counsel.

After the success of the Enron Task Force, Weissmann moved on to the FBI, where he first met Robert Mueller, who was then the bureau’s director. By that point, Mueller was already well-known to Weissmann as no-nonsense, coolly analytical, and a keen listener. But Mueller could also make you laugh.

When Weissmann first sat down in his office, Mueller looked at his resume and groaned. Here was another “un-supervisable prosecutor from the Eastern District of New York.” But this was soon followed by a laugh. It turned out that Mueller had a fondness for tenacious EDNY prosecutors.

During his time at the FBI, Weissmann’s admiration for Mueller increased. In the time following the 9/11 attacks, Weissmann saw Mueller digest daily intelligence briefings day after day, combing through enormous amounts of data, methodically assessing threats to the nation’s security. At the same time, Mueller was always pushing the bureau to do a better job – and leading by example.

In 2013, Weissmann left the FBI to head the fraud section of the Department of Justice. Mueller also left the FBI that year – but the two were reunited a week after Mueller accepted the job of leading the Special Counsel appointed to investigate matters surrounding the 2016 presidential election.

Weissmann led Team M, one of three Special Counsel teams.

The call from the Special Counsel’s Office came in late May 2017. Weissmann sat down for a meeting with Mueller and two colleagues who were already on the team. Jim Quarles had worked on the Watergate case that had brought down Richard Nixon in the 1970s. Aaron Zebley, who Weissmann had worked with at the FBI, was always eager to weigh all the options and find a compromise, making him a counterweight to Mueller’s more decisive temperament.

During that meeting, Weissmann learned what the parameters of the Special Counsel were, and how the teams were set up. He didn’t have to spend too much time deliberating; he quickly decided to say yes to joining the team.

Ongoing investigations into Manafort’s past quickly helped build the case against him.

Quickly, Weissmann was getting a good idea of who Paul Manafort was. He was the kind of guy who spent $100,000 a year just on the gardening bill for his Hamptons estate. His clothing budget was in the millions, and his wardrobe included a $15,000 ostrich-leather jacket. He was the kind of guy whose own daughter said that he had “no moral or legal compass” and that his wealth was “blood money.”

Where was this money coming from? According to the FBI investigators Weissmann spoke to, two of Manafort’s main benefactors in recent years were suspected to be Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch who coordinated his activities with the Kremlin, and Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovych’s political party.

The case against Manafort became stronger when his illegal lobbying activities were discovered.

One of the other ongoing Manafort investigations that was incorporated into the Special Counsel’s case came from the FARA Unit of the Department of Justice. FARA refers to the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

To put it simply, it’s illegal for people to lobby the US government on behalf of foreign interests without first registering those activities with the Department of Justice. But the FARA Unit is understaffed, and so this law is seldom enforced. First, it has to be proven that the foreign lobbyist was aware of the FARA laws and knowingly defied them. More often than not, offenders register once they’re confronted, and no charges are filed. But in Manafort’s case, the evidence of his illegal activity was indisputable.

Evidence of obstruction came in the form of a draft letter announcing Comey’s firing.

While the case against Manafort was moving along quickly, strides were also being made on Team 600. This was the team dealing with the issue of obstruction as it pertained to the firing of James Comey and FBI investigations surrounding Michael Flynn and Russian election interference.

Flynn, who’d been the administration’s national security advisor, had been caught lying to the FBI about the nature of a recorded phone conversation he’d had with the Russian ambassador to the US. But what Team 600 was interested in was whether Trump had tried to interfere with the FBI investigation into Flynn, as well as the ongoing investigation into election interference.

In late 2017, Team R made a remarkable discovery.

In the months that followed the discovery of the draft letter regarding Comey’s firing, interviews with White House staff only served to confirm the suspicions of Team 600. Multiple people explained that Trump had made up his mind about Comey long before Rod Rosenstein’s recommendation that the FBI director be fired.

In fact, Trump even went on national television to say that “regardless of [Rosenstein’s] recommendation, I was going to fire Comey.” The reality is that, technically speaking, the president doesn’t need a reason to fire the director of the FBI. But that doesn’t mean that Trump didn’t also obstruct justice in this instance.

One of the early pieces of evidence for Team R was the infamous meeting at Trump Tower.

Despite the fact that Donald Trump continues to deny Russian election interference, it happened – and it continues to happen today. Months after the Special Counsel’s report, a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation, coming from a Republican-led Senate, concluded that the Internet Research Agency had operated “at the direction of the Kremlin” to support Donald Trump and harm Hillary Clinton. Regardless, Trump prefers to shake hands with Putin and take his word that Russia wasn’t involved.

But what is perhaps most troubling is that there has yet to be a team or task force assigned to neutralize this threat. The message from the Trump administration seems to be, “If it’s helping Trump, why would we try to stop it?” This brings us to the question of whether or not there’s direct evidence of the Trump administration working in coordination with Russia and its efforts at election interference.

In many ways, Team R and Team 600 were entering untested legal waters.

If there was an exchange of information between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives at the Trump Tower meeting, would that have been illegal? The answer isn’t straightforward.

It’s illegal for political candidates to solicit foreigners for anything of value. This law is explicitly intended to keep foreign influence out of US elections. For the same reason, according to campaign finance laws, it’s illegal to accept a contribution or donation of money or “other thing of value” from a foreign entity.

Indictments led to convictions, but the threat of a presidential pardon loomed large.

While Team R prepared to issue indictments against the Russian agents responsible for election interference, Weissmann was moving forward with the case against Manafort. On October 27, 2017, he was indicted on 12 criminal charges, including money laundering, tax evasion, failure to register as a foreign lobbyist, and lying to federal officials.

Amazingly, while he was out on bail, awaiting trial, the crimes didn’t stop. He was also under a gag order not to talk about his case. Yet he repeatedly kept up correspondence with Fox News host Sean Hannity, feeding him talking points for his daily television show. But, eventually, Manafort did have his day in court – and was sentenced to a total of seven and a half years in prison.

Ultimately, the Special Counsel ran up against limits both real and self-imposed.

In the US, is it possible to indict a sitting president? This was a question that lingered throughout the investigation and continued to weigh on Weissmann’s mind long after the investigation had wrapped.

Currently, there are two decisions by the Office of Legal Counsel, part of the Department of Justice, that state that a sitting president cannot be indicted for a crime. It’s worth noting that one of these decisions came during the Nixon administration and the other during the Clinton administration.

The Special Counsel’s report was deliberately misinterpreted, revealing the need for changes in the system.

The Special Counsel’s report was submitted on March 2, 2019. A series of conclusions and findings were also written up as a summary of the full report, which ran to over 400 pages.

The question that the press and the public were waiting to have answered, of course, was one that the report didn’t fully address: Did the president obstruct justice or cooperate with Russian election interference? Weissmann believes that the report’s findings make it clear that the investigation found plenty of evidence to suggest, at the very least, instances of obstruction. In no way does the report exonerate the president. But thanks to the attorney general, that wasn’t the message the public heard.

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What is Where Law Ends about?

Where Law Ends (2020) offers a behind-the-scenes look at the special counsel investigation that resulted in the controversial Mueller Report. It takes you step-by-step through the 22-month process of interviews and evidence gathering that resulted in unprecedented findings that raise serious questions about America’s democratic institutions.

Best quote from Where Law Ends

. . . as I continued to read up on Manafort, it struck me that his desire for that gold-plated lifestyle might provide a motive to commit financial crimes.

—Andrew Weissmann

Who should read Where Law Ends?

American voters worried about election interference
People curious about the limits of executive power
Fans of gripping legal investigations

About the Author

Andrew Weissmann is a veteran prosecutor who’s spent time on many high-profile cases, including the Enron corruption case. Since then, he’s served as general counsel for the FBI, head of the fraud section of the US Department of Justice, and one of the lead prosecutors in the Special Counsel Office under attorney Robert Mueller. He now teaches at the NYU School of Law.

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