Two key sentences. The smoking gun in Robert Mueller's report.

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/04/19/the-mueller-reports-smoking-gun-on-obstruction-of-justice/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR+Irrationality+kidnapping+Mueller&utm_content=NYR+Irrationality+kidnapping+Mueller+CID_028a279d68625f3de0ada6a55251a384&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=The+Mueller+Reports+Smoking+Gun&fbclid=IwAR1bPPl5ExIoquc7uX6LdFOXxBpapNqIn3UI9qDgFIIorQbz26aAHVAIxQ8

It is only two sentences in a report of some 448 pages. As yet unnoticed, these lines provide the strongest new evidence uncovered by Robert Mueller’s investigators that President Donald Trump may have indeed obstructed justice. Two people directly involved in the case told me that several of the special counsel’s prosecutors privately considered this information to be a “smoking gun” suggesting that the president acted criminally.

That section of the Mueller report—which also refers to former FBI Director James Comey, former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, then White House Counsel Don McGahn II, and the former Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak—reads as follows:

By the time the President spoke to Comey about Flynn, DOJ officials had informed McGahn, who informed the President, that Flynn’s statements to senior White House officials about his contacts with Kislyak were not true and that Flynn had told the same version of events to the FBI. McGahn also informed the President that Flynn’s conduct could violate 18 USC §1001. [US Code Title 18 § 1001 is the federal statute that makes it a felony to lie to the FBI or other federal investigators, a crime that Flynn did indeed later plead guilty to.]

The significance of this section is that Trump’s personal attorneys have always defended the president by arguing to the special counsel that Trump did not know that Flynn was under criminal investigation for lying to the FBI about his conversations with Kislyak. For nearly nine months, despite my own reporting for the Daily that contradicted their story, the Trump legal team’s version—that Trump did not understand Flynn was under investigation when he leaned on Comey—largely prevailed. That was until the Mueller report finally laid to rest this fiction.

SNIP