Robert Mueller (Credit: Larry Downing/Reuters)
“The Department of Justice released a new version of the Mueller report Friday afternoon that reveals for the first time that former special counsel Robert Mueller considered charging Donald Trump Jr. with a misdemeanor “computer intrusion” crime for accessing an anti-Trump website using a password he obtained from WikiLeaks.
The new version of the report on Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election also said that Mueller declined, citing insufficient evidence, to charge the political operative Roger Stone with crimes related to the hacking of Democratic National Committee computers and email accounts. And the report “did not establish” that the Trump campaign’s then-director of national security, JD Gordon, was acting as an agent of Russia when he arranged for changes to the Republican platform during the 2016 convention.
The new version of the Mueller report contains nearly a dozen new unredacted passages and was released in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by BuzzFeed News in 2019. The lawsuit sought portions of the report that would reveal the identities of people Mueller considered charging and whose names were originally redacted. A lower court ruled against BuzzFeed News, which appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit last year. Today’s release marks the third time BuzzFeed News has forced the Justice Department to unredact portions of the 448-page report.
