Robby Mook: 'Apparently It’s Not Criminal to Help Foreign Agents'

Former 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook on Thursday reacted angerly to special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on now-debunked Trump-Russia collusion.

“Apparently it’s not criminal to help foreign agents carry out their plans to disrupt an election,” Mook told Politico. “I wish instead of just relitigating the past we would spend some time crafting laws to prevent this in the future.”

The special counsel’s findings specified how the Trump campaign heard in advance about a WikiLeaks document dump of emails that Russian intelligence associates hacked from the servers of the Clinton campaign and the Democrat National Committee (DNC). Team Mueller wrote that while they uncovered communications between Trump staffers and Russian nationals, “the investigation did not establish that the Trump campaign coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

“After candidate Trump stated on July 27, 2016, that he hoped Russia would ‘find the 30,000 emails that are missing,’ Trump asked individuals affiliated with his campaign to find the deleted Clinton emails,” the report reads. “Michael Flynn — who would later serve as national security adviser in the Trump administration — recalled that Trump made this request repeatedly, and Flynn subsequently contacted multiple people in an effort to obtain the emails.”

In an opinion-editorial for the Washington Post, John Podesta, Clinton’s former campaign chairman, echoed Mook’s view, writing that the report “lays out a devastating case” against President Trump. “Mueller lays out a devastating case against the president, but explicitly says in the introduction to the obstruction section that given the Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president, it would be unfair to draw the conclusion that seems obvious from the facts that follow, because Trump wouldn’t be able to defend himself in a court of law,” wrote the longtime Clinton loyalist.
“Mueller got us this far. Now it’s Congress’s turn to weigh the evidence against the president, decide what merits a response and act in the best interests of our democracy,” he went on.

The Justice Department on Thursday released the long-awaited report from Mueller, with redactions, which specifies the two-year Russia investigation and details how the team found no evidence of collusion involving the Trump campaign before the 2016 election.