Durbin calls Mueller report findings on Trump team ‘troubling’

Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) says special counsel Robert Mueller’s findings about contacts between Trump campaign officials and Russian agents, as well as President Trump’s efforts to impede Mueller’s investigation, are “troubling.”

“The Special Counsel’s findings paint a very different picture than what the President and his Attorney General would have the American people believe,” Durbin said in a statement Thursday following the Mueller report’s release.

“Special Counsel Mueller has provided a detailed and sobering report about the troubling contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russians and about the President’s efforts to impede and end the Special Counsel’s investigation,” he said. 

{mosads}Durbin, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, joined other Democrats in calling for Mueller to testify before the Senate and House Judiciary committees.  

Mueller found that Russian officials reached out to Trump’s campaign on several occasions with pledges of assistance, although they sometimes didn’t follow through or campaign officials were unaware they were dealing with Russian agents. 

Sen. Patrick Leahy (Vt.), another senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said “members of the Trump campaign were not simply useful pawns in Russia’s attack on our elections.”

“They were eager, unapologetic beneficiaries of Russia’s interference. They welcomed it. They encouraged the release of stolen materials and planned a press strategy around it. They not once reported it to law enforcement authorities. Then they misrepresented the facts and hid their actions from the American people,” Leahy said in a statement.

The highest-profile interaction came on June 9, 2016, when senior representatives of the Trump campaign, including Donald Trump Jr., campaign chairman Paul Manafort and senior adviser Jared Kushner met with a Russian attorney “expecting to receive derogatory information” about Trump’s campaign opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. 

The attorney, Natalia Veselnitskaya, however, failed to provide any evidence backing up her claims that Clinton and other Democrats had received funds from illegal activity in Russia and instead talked about U.S. sanctions against Russian officials. 

On July 27, 2016, then-candidate Trump publicly called on Russia to help find documents missing from Clinton’s personal computer server, saying, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”

Russian military hackers that same day targeted the email accounts of Clinton’s personal office. They also broke into a Democratic National Committee account hosted on the cloud.

Mueller reported that Russian agents working for the GRU, a military intelligence agency, contacted a former Trump campaign member while posing as the hacker Guccifer 2.0 to ask about a stolen Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee document, which the Trump official described in a response as “pretty standard.” 

The special counsel also found that on June 17, 2017, Trump called then-White House counsel Don McGahn and instructed him to call acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and inform him that Mueller must be removed from his post for conflicts of interest. McGahn refused by saying he would rather resign than trigger a “potential Saturday Night Massacre.”