BOOKS OF THE TIMES
A Prosecutor’s Backstage Tour of the Mueller Investigation
By Jennifer Szalai
NY Times, Sept. 21, 2020
Where Law Ends
Inside the Mueller Investigation
By Andrew Weissmann
402 pages. Random House. $30.
There’s something refreshing about an author who harbors no illusions
about his own book — especially when that book is about the current
occupant of the White House, whose chaotic energy has spawned a booming
industry of insider accounts and cris de coeur.
Andrew Weissmann, who served as one of Robert Mueller’s top lawyers in
the special counsel’s investigation into the 2016 election, knows that
his new memoir, “Where Law Ends,” won’t destroy “the machinery of
information that separates fact from fiction,” but he wants to enter his
experience into the historical record. “If the special counsel’s office
did not write our own story, it would be written for us by outsiders who
did not know what had occurred,” Weissmann explains in his introduction.
What follows, though, doesn’t exactly burnish the legacy of the special
counsel’s office, and I have to imagine that this book will probably
strike the famously tight-lipped Mueller as an act of betrayal.
Weissmann’s portrait of his boss is admiring, affectionate and utterly
devastating. Mueller enters the narrative like the ideal boss:
no-nonsense, unfailingly honest and also prone to quirks like a penchant
for hazelnut decaf sweetened with a glug of Bailey’s-flavored
nonalcoholic creamer. By the end of the book, Mueller seems trapped by
his old-fashioned establishmentarian instincts, so worried about
overstepping his role that he erred on the side of “understepping it,”
Weissmann writes, issuing a “mealy-mouthed” report that showed the
president had obstructed justice while refusing to say as much.
Mueller’s fundamental flaw, Weissmann says, was a persistent faith in a
Justice Department headed by his old friend William Barr. The Mueller
team had meticulously laid out their findings in their 448-page,
antiseptically worded report, only to be “blindsided” by Barr’s
four-page self-styled summary, which Weissmann depicts as a nakedly
cynical distortion of the truth: “We had just been played by the
attorney general.”
Weissmann’s previous experience prosecuting financial chicanery (Enron)
and organized crime (John Gotti, known as “the Teflon Don”) proved to be
useful. Mueller appointed him the head of Team M — as in Team Manafort,
tasked with investigating the political consultant who served as the
Trump campaign’s chairman during the summer of 2016. A good part of the
book is devoted to showing how Weissmann and his colleagues built their
case against Paul Manafort for violating lobbying and financial laws;
Manafort, who had extensive experience with pro-Kremlin forces in
Ukraine, was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison (and recently
released to home confinement, because of the pandemic).
Team M got people to flip on one another, working its way up the chain
of command. A big break came when a hapless millennial who was hired by
Manafort as an all-purpose errand boy revealed that Manafort had passed
down his old devices and computers, instructing him to wipe them before
using them — something this particular employee didn’t always take the
time to do.
Manafort is depicted in this book as lying to everyone — even trying to
orchestrate an elaborate kickback scheme so that he could offer to work
for the Trump campaign for free while siphoning money from a pro-Trump
PAC. Weissmann and his team puzzled over why Manafort kept hiding this
particular instance of chicanery after admitting to others, thereby
jeopardizing his own plea deal. The probable reason, it turns out, was
tweeting them in the face: Trump, who Weissmann says wasn’t especially
fond of Manafort, had taken to social media to issue public declarations
of sympathy for “Paul Manafort and his wonderful family. Such respect
for a brave man.” If Manafort was ultimately angling for a presidential
pardon, the president would undoubtedly be incensed to learn that
Manafort had been cooking up a scheme to get paid behind Trump’s back.
“Mobsters used the threat of ‘whacking’ potential cooperators to keep
everyone in line,” Weissmann writes. “The president had the power to
pardon to reward those who stayed loyal.” It’s a startling analogy that
Weissmann delivers in his characteristically muted, matter-of-fact
style. Unlike the other Trump books that get hyped as “explosive,” this
one lays out its case so patiently that its conclusions arrive not with
a bang but with a snap — the click of an indictment falling into place.
Yet the president isn’t the main subject of this book’s investigation —
that evidence was already compiled in the Mueller report. What
Weissmann’s book provides is the inside story of how the country’s
institutions have so far failed, he says, to hold a “lawless White
House” to account. Weissmann describes two factions on the Mueller team
— those who tried to push for a tougher approach, and others like
Mueller’s deputy, Aaron Zebley, who could be cautious to the point of
rank timidity. On the subject of Russian interference in the 2016
election, Mueller’s team had found communications among professional
trolls, employed by the Kremlin, crowing about their celebrations after
Trump won. Zebley insisted they omit such evidence from their final
report, Weissmann says, for fear that it was “too salacious.”
But we live in salacious times, and Weissmann’s book is a fascinating
document — a candid mea culpa, a riveting true-crime story, that’s
nonetheless presented in the measured prose of someone who remains a
stalwart institutionalist. The title of the book comes from a quote by
John Locke — “Wherever law ends, tyranny begins” — and Weissmann’s
suggested solutions reflect his own faith in the perfectibility of
institutions. He proposes granting the power to appoint a special
counsel to the director of national intelligence — a pretty idea that
isn’t entirely explicable, considering that the director of national
intelligence is a cabinet-level official who reports to the president.
Weissmann reserves his most scathing words for Attorney General Barr,
someone whom Weissmann used to respect, but who now gets pride of place
in the same “gaggle of presidential defenders and conspirators” that
includes Trump’s “attorney/fixer” Rudy Giuliani. Here Weissmann delivers
the kind of forceful, ringing indictment that Mueller’s report did not;
Barr, he says, is one of the “old white men who’ve participated in, or
condoned, improper or illegal conduct by the White House.”
Follow Jennifer Szalai on Twitter: @jenszalai.
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