8/30/20
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department secretly took steps in 2017 to narrow the investigation into Russian election interference and any links to the Trump campaign, according to former law enforcement officials, keeping investigators from completing an examination of President Trump’s decades-long personal and business ties to Russia. The special counsel who finished the investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, secured three dozen indictments and convictions of some top Trump advisers, and he produced a report that outlined Russia’s wide-ranging operations to help get Mr. Trump elected and the president’s efforts to impede the inquiry. But law enforcement officials never fully investigated Mr. Trump’s own relationship with Russia, even though some career F.B.I. counterintelligence investigators thought his ties posed such a national security threat that they took the extraordinary step of opening an inquiry into them. Within days, the former deputy attorney general Rod J. Rosenstein curtailed the investigation without telling the bureau, all but ensuring it would go nowhere. A bipartisan report by the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee released this month came the closest to an examination of the president’s links to Russia.
Mr. Rosenstein declined to comment. The disclosure about the counterintelligence investigation is based on interviews with former Justice Department and F.B.I. officials. Installing Mr. Mueller as special counsel in May 2017, Mr. Rosenstein ordered him to examine “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government” and the Trump campaign. Many Democrats embraced the appointment as a sign that law enforcement would complete a full accounting of Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia. But privately, Mr. Rosenstein instructed Mr. Mueller to conduct only a criminal investigation into whether anyone broke the law in connection with Russia’s 2016 election interference, former law enforcement officials said. f Mr. Mueller wanted to expand his investigation, Mr. Rosenstein told him, he should ask for additional authorities and resources. But the special counsel built a staff — some inherited from the Justice Department and F.B.I., some of whom he hired — to investigate crimes, not threats to national security, which is the purview of counterintelligence investigations. Mr. Mueller later told Congress he did not conduct a counterintelligence investigation. The Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, said in a memo released last week that he had reason to believe “that the F.B.I. Counterintelligence Division has not investigated counterintelligence risks arising from President Trump’s foreign financial ties.”
