One major takeaway from the Mueller report is that Trump and those around him have a penchant for lies and misleading statements. Mueller’s report did not lay out a case for criminal conspiracy. But it did acknowledge that he may have been able to, had Trump campaign officials been up front. “Even when individuals testified or agreed to be interviewed, they sometimes provided information that was false or incomplete,” he wrote. After all, Manafort’s cooperation deal fell apart thanks to his obfuscations and misleading statements. Of Manafort, Mueller concedes he was unable to gain access to all of the longtime political operative’s communications. “While Manafort denied that he spoke to members of the Trump Campaign or the new administration about the peace plan and his meetings with Kilimnik,” he wrote, “his unreliability on this subject was among the reasons that the district judge found that he breached his cooperation agreement.”
Mueller also noted that he was hindered by campaign officials who “deleted relevant communications or communicated during the relevant period using applications that feature encryption or that do not provide for long-term retention of data or communications records.” For instance, Mueller came up empty-handed in determining the purpose of a clandestine meeting between Erik Prince and Kirill Dmitriev, the head of a Russian sovereign wealth fund, in Seychelles during the presidential transition, because both Prince and Steve Bannon were unable to produce records of their discussions around the meeting. Similarly, Mueller’s inability to determine whether Papadopoulos told other members of the Trump campaign about Mifsud’s scoop on the Russians having “dirt” on Clinton came down to Papadopoulos not being able to “clearly recall having told anyone.” Campaign officials who “interacted or corresponded with” Papadopoulos told Mueller, with “varying degrees of certainty, that he did not tell them.”
If everyone he spoke with had cooperated to the extent Barr claimed, Mueller may have been able to prove a conspiracy. Mueller himself suggested this when he wrote that he “cannot rule out the possibility that the unavailable information would shed additional light on (or cast in a new light) the events described in the report.”
