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| Meta Title | Donald Trump - Russia investigation | Britannica |
| Meta Description | Donald Trump - Russia investigation: In February 2017 Trump’s new national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was forced to resign after press reports disclosed that Flynn had continued to serve in the White House despite a warning from the Justice Department that he was vulnerable to Russian blackmail for having lied to Vice Pres. Mike Pence about the substance of a telephone conversation between Flynn and the Russian ambassador to the United States in December 2016. Flynn’s contacts with the ambassador, both before and after the election, had been monitored by the FBI as part of its routine surveillance of the ambassador’s communications and in connection |
| Meta Canonical | null |
| Boilerpipe Text | Donald Trump
Donald Trump speaking at a rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania, a month after winning the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
In February 2017 Trump’s new national security adviser,
Michael Flynn
, was forced to resign after press reports disclosed that Flynn had continued to serve in the
White House
despite a warning from the
Justice
Department that he was
vulnerable
to
Russian
blackmail
for having lied to Vice Pres.
Mike Pence
about the substance of a telephone conversation between Flynn and the Russian ambassador to the
United States
in December 2016. Flynn’s contacts with the ambassador, both before and after the election, had been monitored by the
FBI as part of its routine surveillance of the ambassador’s communications and in connection with a then secret investigation since July 2016 of possible collusion between Russian officials and prominent members of the Trump campaign. That investigation had been triggered by information obtained by Australian authorities, who reported to the
FBI
in May that
George Papadopoulos
, a foreign-policy adviser in the Trump campaign, had told an Australian diplomat in London that Russia had “dirt” on
Clinton
, an apparent reference to the stolen emails that were eventually released by
WikiLeaks
in July.
News
•
Speculation
in the press regarding the existence of the investigation had been repeatedly dismissed by Trump as “fake news” but was confirmed by
Comey
in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee in March 2017, during which he also contradicted Trump’s claim that
Obama
had spied on the Trump campaign by tapping Trump’s telephones. Democratic members of Congress, meanwhile, expressed dismay that Comey had chosen to report the discovery of additional Clinton emails in October 2016 but had waited until after the election to reveal the Russia investigation.
After Comey testified again in May about Russian interference in the election, Trump abruptly fired him, ostensibly on the recommendation of the Justice Department, which in memos solicited by Trump criticized Comey for his public disclosures regarding Clinton’s emails. Trump soon acknowledged that he had intended to fire Comey regardless of the Justice Department’s recommendation and that “this Russia thing” was a factor in his decision. Later that month the press obtained a copy of a memo written by Comey that summarized a conversation between Comey and Trump at a dinner at the White House in January. The memo stated that Trump had asked Comey to pledge “loyalty” to him and that Trump had indirectly requested that Comey drop the FBI’s investigation of Flynn. The memo immediately raised concerns, even among some Republicans, that Trump’s actions might have
constituted
obstruction of justice. The deputy
attorney general
, Rod Rosenstein, then announced the appointment of former FBI director
Robert Mueller
as special
counsel
to oversee the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the election and possible collusion between Russian officials and the Trump campaign, which Rosenstein’s appointment order characterized as “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.” Mueller was also authorized to investigate and prosecute any federal crimes arising directly from or committed in the course of the investigation, including obstruction of justice, perjury, destruction of evidence, and witness intimidation.
Comey’s testimony in June before the Senate Intelligence Committee—which, like the House Intelligence Committee, was conducting its own investigation—was broadcast live on
television
,
radio
, and the
Internet
. Many Americans watched from bars and restaurants, which opened early in some parts of the
country
to provide
venues
for viewing the much-anticipated event. Comey accused Trump and other administration officials of lying about Comey’s effectiveness as director of the FBI, and he attributed his being fired to Trump’s
alleged
desire to shut down the Russia investigation. Comey also revealed that, after being fired, he indirectly leaked the memo that recounted his dinner conversation with Trump in the hope of triggering the appointment of a special counsel to continue the Russia investigation.
Early in July 2017 the press reported that in June 2016 senior members of the Trump campaign, including its chair,
Paul Manafort
, as well as
Jared Kushner and Trump’s son
Donald, Jr.
, had met secretly in
Trump Tower
with a lawyer associated with the Russian government. In response, Donald, Jr., issued a statement in which he claimed that the meeting had primarily concerned adoptions of Russian children by Americans and that he had not known in advance who on the Russian side would be
attending
. Three days later the press reported the existence of emails predating the meeting in which the British publicist Rob Goldstone (who had helped Trump stage the 2013 Miss Universe contest in
Moscow
) notified Donald, Jr., that the Russian government possessed incriminating “documents and information” on Clinton and offered to set up a meeting to convey them through a “Russian government attorney.” Attendance at such a meeting was potentially a crime under U.S.
campaign finance law
, which generally prohibits accepting or soliciting foreign assistance in connection with a U.S. election.
More From Britannica
United States: The Donald Trump administration
In January 2018 President Trump’s legal team acknowledged in a memo to the Mueller investigation that Trump himself had
dictated
the false account of the meeting (claiming that it had concerned adoptions), thus contradicting earlier statements by his attorneys and by
White House press secretaries
. In August 2018 Trump admitted via Twitter that the purpose of the meeting was “to get information on an opponent” but insisted that the encounter was perfectly legal, that no information was forthcoming, and that he did not know about the meeting in advance. For the first time, he also publicly (on Twitter) called upon Attorney General
Jeff Sessions
to put an end to the Russia investigation by firing Mueller—a power, however, that Sessions did not possess, having
recused
himself in March 2017 after revelations of his previously undisclosed contacts with the Russian ambassador as a member of the Trump campaign in September 2016.
In October 2017 the Mueller investigation announced a
plea agreement
with Papadopoulos in which he admitted to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian nationals regarding the theft of emails from the Clinton campaign and pledged to cooperate with the investigation in exchange for its promise not to prosecute him on more serious charges. Later that month the Mueller team also unveiled a 12-count
indictment
against Manafort and his associate Rick Gates (who himself had been an adviser to the Trump campaign), charging them with
money laundering
, tax evasion, and bank fraud in connection with Manafort’s consulting and lobbying efforts on behalf of Ukrainian political parties and leaders between 2006 and 2015. As part of a plea agreement with prosecutors, Flynn twice pleaded guilty in federal district court to lying to the FBI—once in December 2017 and again in December 2018. (Flynn’s sentencing was postponed by the district court on several occasions, initially to permit Flynn to cooperate with government investigators, which he did until mid-2019.) In February 2018 additional charges were filed against Manafort and Gates in a superseding indictment, leading Gates to reach a plea agreement; Gates’s testimony at Manafort’s trial in July–August was instrumental in securing the latter’s
conviction
on eight criminal counts. Facing a separate trial on other felony charges in September, Manafort reached his own plea agreement with the Mueller investigation that month.
Also in February 2018 the Mueller investigation indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian organizations on charges of conspiring to defraud the United States by interfering in its political and electoral processes, including the 2016 election. The indictment charged that the individual defendants, working in part through facilities provided by the Internet Research Agency (IRA) in St. Petersburg, used hundreds of fictitious and stolen
social media
identities to spread “derogatory information” about Clinton and to support Trump. According to the
indictment
, they also engaged in efforts to discourage minorities from voting, promoted allegations of voter fraud by the
Democratic Party
, purchased political advertisements on social media, and used false U.S. identities to organize on-the-ground political rallies in several states.
Acting on a referral by the Mueller investigation, in April the FBI raided the home and office of
Michael Cohen
, Trump’s personal attorney, seizing business records and recordings of telephone conversations between Cohen and his clients, including Trump. According to press reports, Cohen was being investigated on charges of tax evasion, bank fraud, and violations of campaign finance law in connection with his role in making or arranging hush-money payments in 2016 to
Stormy Daniels and the model Karen McDougal in fulfillment of nondisclosure agreements concerning their alleged affairs with Trump in 2006–07. In March both women filed lawsuits seeking to have their agreements declared
invalid
. Cohen eventually pleaded guilty to eight criminal counts in August 2018 in a hearing at which he stated under oath that Trump had directed him to make or arrange payments to Daniels and McDougal. (Following the end of his first presidential term in 2021, Trump himself was indicted on state criminal charges of falsifying business records to conceal the Trump Organization’s reimbursement of Cohen for the hush-money payment to Daniels.)
In July 2018 Mueller indicted 12 Russian
military intelligence
officers for conspiring to interfere in the 2016 election by stealing thousands of emails and other documents from computer servers of the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign and publicly releasing them through fictitious social media identities and WikiLeaks. The indictment also charged the officers with breaking into the
computer network
of at least one state board of elections and stealing data on approximately 500,000 voters. (In a secret May 2017 report, later leaked to the press, the
National Security Agency
[NSA] determined that a total of 39 state boards of election had been targeted.) The announcement of the indictment prompted Trump to again express doubt that Russia was responsible for the interference, as he had done on several occasions since the beginning of the Russia investigation, and to again assert that the FBI was corrupt and dishonest for not pursuing a
criminal investigation
of Clinton.
In September 2018 Papadopoulos was sentenced to serve 14 days in a minimum-security federal prison for lying to the FBI, becoming the first Trump campaign official to be jailed in connection with the Russia investigation. Two months later, in November, Mueller informed a trial judge that Manafort had violated his plea agreement by again lying in interviews with investigators and by making false statements before a
grand jury
. Manafort was eventually sentenced to a
combined
7.5 years in prison by two federal courts in March 2019. Later that month he was charged with an additional 16 state felonies by the district attorney for
Manhattan
. Meanwhile, in November 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to separate charges of lying to Congress for having told the House and Senate intelligence committees that Trump’s efforts to build a
hotel
in Moscow had ended in January 2016, when, in fact, they had continued until at least June of that year, by which time Trump had become the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison in December 2018.
Also in November 2018, Trump fired Sessions and appointed as acting attorney general
Matthew Whitaker, Sessions’s former chief of staff, who had been an outspoken critic of the Russia investigation before joining the Justice Department. Controversy over whether Whitaker should
recuse
himself from the investigation was soon overshadowed, however, by Trump’s nomination in December of
William Barr
as Sessions’s permanent successor. Barr, who had served (1991–93) as attorney general in the
George H.W. Bush
administration, was known for his extreme view of executive power—one that entailed, among other things, that presidents cannot commit
obstruction of justice through the exercise of the discretionary powers granted to them by the Constitution. Notably, Barr relied upon that theory to question the legitimacy of the Mueller investigation in an unsolicited memo that he submitted to the Justice Department in June 2018. The memo, which came to light soon after Barr’s nomination, immediately drew
criticism
from Democrats, who viewed it as an attempt to curry favor with the Trump administration and as a signal of Barr’s apparent willingness to shut down the Mueller inquiry if Trump so ordered. At his confirmation hearings Barr pledged that he would not interfere in the Russia investigation but refused to say whether he would release Mueller’s final report to the public. He was confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate in February 2019 in a mostly party-line vote.
Approximately five weeks after his confirmation, Barr informed
Congress
that Mueller had submitted a final report on the results of his investigation and that there would be no additional indictments. (By that time, Mueller’s team had indicted 34 individuals and three businesses on nearly 200 criminal charges and obtained seven guilty pleas.) Two days later Barr sent to Congress an unusual written summary of the report’s contents, in which he stated that Mueller had not found sufficient evidence to establish a charge of
conspiracy
regarding the Trump campaign’s interactions with Russia and that Mueller had not made a traditional recommendation about whether Trump should be prosecuted for obstruction of justice. Absent that recommendation, he continued, he and Rosenstein had themselves determined that the evidence presented in Mueller’s report was “not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.” Barr’s public release of the summary at about the same time, and its wide coverage in the press, encouraged many Americans to assume that Mueller’s report had found no serious wrongdoing by the
president
, though others remained skeptical. According to press reports in late April, Mueller had privately written to Barr soon after the summary became public to complain that Barr’s characterization of the report to Congress “did not fully capture the
context
, nature, and substance of this Office’s work and conclusions” and had created “public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation.”
On April 18, nearly one month after his letter to Congress, Barr released a
redacted
version of the Mueller report. House Democrats welcomed the release but insisted that Barr make available to them all
confidential
grand jury materials and the redacted passages related to them. After Barr refused, the House Judiciary Committee sued the Justice Department and obtained a
court order
in October requiring the release of the grand jury materials. That order was later upheld by a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the
District of Columbia
Circuit, a decision that the Justice Department appealed to the Supreme Court in July. In late November, after Biden’s victory over Trump in the 2020 presidential election, the Court removed the case from its argument calendar at the request of the Judiciary Committee.
The two volumes of Mueller’s report reflected the dual
mandates
of his appointment as special counsel: the first detailed the goals and methods of the Russian attack on the
2016 presidential election
, and the second outlined several potentially obstructive actions taken by Trump in connection with the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference (begun in July 2016) and the subsequent investigation led by Mueller (begun in May 2017).
Mueller’s office concluded in the first volume that there was insufficient evidence to establish that “members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government” despite “numerous links” between the two as detailed in the report. In the second volume, Mueller explained that his office had decided not to recommend charges of obstruction of justice against Trump because Justice Department regulations prohibited the indictment or criminal prosecution of a sitting president and because the office deemed it unfair to accuse Trump of a crime outside the context of a formal trial, where he would have the opportunity to answer the charges against him. Nevertheless, Mueller emphasized in the conclusion of the second volume that
if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.
Although the Mueller report appeared to document numerous instances of impeachable behavior by Trump, Democrats in the House were initially divided over whether a formal impeachment
inquiry
should be opened. Despite demands for immediate action from several liberal Democrats, the House leadership and most other Democratic members preferred a more cautious approach, arguing that most Americans were opposed to impeachment and that Trump could not be removed from office anyway, because he was certain to be acquitted in the Republican-controlled Senate. The latter view, which House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi
had advocated even before the release of the Mueller report, remained the prevailing position within the Democratic Party until the late summer of 2019 (
see below
Ukraine scandal
).
In December 2019 the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General released a report on its investigation of the FBI’s actions during the early stages of the Russia investigation (then code-named “Crossfire Hurricane”). The report addressed, among other topics, whether the FBI had observed proper procedures in opening Crossfire Hurricane and four individual investigations of members of the Trump campaign (Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Manafort, and Flynn) and whether the FBI had placed any undercover agents within the Trump campaign to gain information about possible links and coordination with the Russian government. Although the report concluded that the investigation had been legitimately opened and that there was no evidence of political
bias
or of FBI “spying” on the Trump campaign, it also faulted the FBI and the Justice Department for serious errors and omissions and at least one case of apparent criminal wrongdoing in its handling of applications (to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court [FISC]) for warrants to surveil Page, then a Trump campaign adviser.
In an extraordinary decision in May 2020, the Justice Department moved to drop its case against Flynn on the grounds that his statements to the FBI were not “materially” relevant to the bureau’s investigation and that, in any event, the investigation of Flynn itself lacked any
legitimate
counterintelligence or criminal purpose. Although the district court’s refusal to drop the case was eventually upheld by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the case became moot after Trump pardoned Flynn in late November 2020. In the last weeks of his presidency, Trump also granted pardons to Manafort and to
Roger Stone, a friend and adviser who had been convicted of lying to Congress, obstruction, and witness tampering in connection with the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Other investigations
As Mueller’s investigation proceeded, and through the release of his report in March, several House committees—including the Judiciary Committee, the Select Committee on Intelligence, the Ways and Means Committee, the Foreign Affairs Committee, the Committee on Oversight and Reform, and the Financial Services Committee—were conducting their own
inquiries
into possible tax and financial crimes by Trump, the Trump Organization, the Trump inaugural committee, and the charitable Trump Foundation (dissolved in 2018), evidence of which had arisen from Mueller’s investigation and from congressional testimony by Cohen and other Trump associates. At the same time, the office of the U.S. District Attorney for the Southern District of
New York
(SDNY) continued its separate inquiry into possible tax fraud and violations of campaign-finance law by Trump in connection with the alleged hush-money payments to Daniels and McDougal (that investigation, however, was abruptly closed without explanation in July 2019). Other federal prosecutors, as well as state and local authorities, were looking into possible lawbreaking by Trump in connection with questionable donations to Trump’s
inaugural
committee, an alleged offer of a presidential pardon to Cohen, misuse of charitable assets by the Trump Foundation, accusations that Trump inflated the value of his assets in four major Trump Organization projects, apparently illegal tax schemes by the Trump family (
see above
Early life and business career
), and other matters. By the summer of 2019 approximately 30 criminal or civil investigations of Trump and his family or associates were underway.
Since the early months of that year, however, the Trump administration had regularly refused to provide documents or witness testimony requested or subpoenaed by Democratic-led House committees investigating alleged corruption, abuse of power, and obstruction of justice by Trump or the Trump administration. In the wake of the public release in April of the redacted Mueller report, Trump publicly affirmed his administration’s refusal to cooperate with the House investigations, declaring that “we’re fighting all the subpoenas.” He and congressional Republicans frequently insisted that all such inquiries were
illegitimate
politically motivated attempts to embarrass Trump or to overturn the results of the 2016 election. Although past administrations, including the
Richard Nixon
administration, had also regularly defied congressional oversight, particularly with claims of
executive privilege
, none had so broadly rejected, on explicitly partisan grounds, any congressional oversight whatsoever. Some
constitutional
scholars warned that Trump’s refusal to recognize any legitimate purpose to Congress’s investigations of his administration threatened to undermine the constitutionally established
separation of powers
between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. Soon after Pelosi announced the beginning of a formal impeachment investigation of Trump in September 2019 (
see below
Ukraine scandal
), the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, announced in a letter to her and other House leaders that the Trump administration would refuse to cooperate with the inquiry in any way, primarily because it allegedly did not afford Trump the
due process
guarantees provided to defendants in criminal trials. The House investigation, however, was not a trial.
After
Michael Cohen
’s
testimony
to Congress in February 2019 that Trump had regularly inflated or deflated the value of his assets in order to obtain bank loans or to reduce his real estate taxes, respectively, the House Oversight Committee in March requested 10 years of Trump’s financial records from Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars, which responded that it could not legally provide the desired records. The committee’s subsequent subpoena was challenged by Trump in a lawsuit against Mazars and the Oversight Committee but ultimately upheld by a U.S. district court and the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Responding to an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court by Trump’s attorneys, Chief Justice
John Roberts, Jr.
, indefinitely stayed the subpoena while the Court considered whether to review the judge’s decision. Meanwhile, two other House committees, on Financial Services and Intelligence, issued subpoenas to Deutsche Bank, Trump’s primary lender since the late 1990s, seeking nearly 10 years of tax returns and other financial documents; the Financial Services Committee also subpoenaed the U.S. bank Capital One for similar information. Trump’s lawsuit to prevent the two banks from releasing his financial information was rejected by a district court and, on appeal, by the Court of Appeals for the Second
Circuit
. In a third case, Trump sued New York state officials (and preemptively the House Ways and Means Committee) to block enforcement of a grand jury subpoena to Mazars for eight years of his state tax returns, arguing that a sitting president is immune from state criminal subpoenas. After a district court dismissed that doctrine as “repugnant to the nation’s governmental structure and constitutional values” and the Second Circuit affirmed, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed in December 2019 to hear all three cases, consolidating the first two as
Trump
v.
Mazars
. The Court ultimately declined to invalidate the subpoenas in
Mazars
but remanded the cases to the lower courts for further consideration of their
implications
for the separation of powers between Congress and the president. In
Trump
v.
Vance
the Court rejected Trump’s assertion of
immunity
but again remanded the case to permit him to challenge the subpoena on other grounds. |
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## Russia investigation
in [Donald Trump](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Donald-Trump) in
# [Trump’s first presidential term](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Donald-Trump/Presidential-election-of-2016#ref397483)
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Also known as: Donald John Trump
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[Brian Duignan Brian Duignan is a senior editor at Encyclopædia Britannica. His subject areas include philosophy, law, social science, politics, political theory, and religion.](https://www.britannica.com/editor/brian-duignan/6469)
Brian Duignan
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Apr. 12, 2026
•[History](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Donald-Trump/additional-info#history)
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[](https://cdn.britannica.com/49/193149-050-6E032CB8/Donald-Trump-rally-Pennsylvania-Hershey-election-2016.jpg)
[Donald Trump](https://cdn.britannica.com/49/193149-050-6E032CB8/Donald-Trump-rally-Pennsylvania-Hershey-election-2016.jpg)Donald Trump speaking at a rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania, a month after winning the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
(more)
In February 2017 Trump’s new national security adviser, [Michael Flynn](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Michael-Flynn), was forced to resign after press reports disclosed that Flynn had continued to serve in the [White House](https://www.britannica.com/topic/White-House-Washington-DC) despite a warning from the [Justice](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Justice) Department that he was [vulnerable](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vulnerable) to Russian [blackmail](https://www.britannica.com/topic/extortion) for having lied to Vice Pres. [Mike Pence](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mike-Pence) about the substance of a telephone conversation between Flynn and the Russian ambassador to the [United States](https://www.britannica.com/place/United-States) in December 2016. Flynn’s contacts with the ambassador, both before and after the election, had been monitored by the FBI as part of its routine surveillance of the ambassador’s communications and in connection with a then secret investigation since July 2016 of possible collusion between Russian officials and prominent members of the Trump campaign. That investigation had been triggered by information obtained by Australian authorities, who reported to the [FBI](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Federal-Bureau-of-Investigation) in May that [George Papadopoulos](https://www.britannica.com/biography/George-Papadopoulos), a foreign-policy adviser in the Trump campaign, had told an Australian diplomat in London that Russia had “dirt” on [Clinton](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hillary-Clinton), an apparent reference to the stolen emails that were eventually released by [WikiLeaks](https://www.britannica.com/topic/WikiLeaks) in July.
## News •
[US and Iran end ceasefire talks without agreement and blame each other](https://www.britannica.com/news/607230/a8a0d22918fc3fb30bc3abf1cd5c5a13)
• Apr. 12, 2026, 7:47 AM ET (AP)
...(Show more)
[Hungary decides in a key election that could unseat populist Prime Minister Orbán](https://www.britannica.com/news/607230/1a4eb0ba6b94e0c80c3cd18bd36254ab) • Apr. 12, 2026, 7:47 AM ET (AP)
[The Latest: US and Iranian delegations leave Pakistan after talks end without agreement](https://www.britannica.com/news/607230/da12451198d54f63926d06983b262f98) • Apr. 12, 2026, 6:48 AM ET (AP)
[Pakistan calls on Iran and US to keep the ceasefire after talks end without agreement](https://www.britannica.com/news/607230/2be904aee3f804892336730279e054b9) • Apr. 12, 2026, 12:04 AM ET (AP)
[Iran war diverts US military and attention from Asia ahead of Trump's summit with China's leader](https://www.britannica.com/news/607230/44891d1bdf2c6b47acc766a8faf69ec6) • Apr. 12, 2026, 12:02 AM ET (AP)
Show less
[Speculation](https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/Speculation) in the press regarding the existence of the investigation had been repeatedly dismissed by Trump as “fake news” but was confirmed by [Comey](https://www.britannica.com/biography/James-Comey) in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee in March 2017, during which he also contradicted Trump’s claim that [Obama](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Barack-Obama) had spied on the Trump campaign by tapping Trump’s telephones. Democratic members of Congress, meanwhile, expressed dismay that Comey had chosen to report the discovery of additional Clinton emails in October 2016 but had waited until after the election to reveal the Russia investigation.
After Comey testified again in May about Russian interference in the election, Trump abruptly fired him, ostensibly on the recommendation of the Justice Department, which in memos solicited by Trump criticized Comey for his public disclosures regarding Clinton’s emails. Trump soon acknowledged that he had intended to fire Comey regardless of the Justice Department’s recommendation and that “this Russia thing” was a factor in his decision. Later that month the press obtained a copy of a memo written by Comey that summarized a conversation between Comey and Trump at a dinner at the White House in January. The memo stated that Trump had asked Comey to pledge “loyalty” to him and that Trump had indirectly requested that Comey drop the FBI’s investigation of Flynn. The memo immediately raised concerns, even among some Republicans, that Trump’s actions might have [constituted](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/constituted) obstruction of justice. The deputy [attorney general](https://www.britannica.com/topic/attorney-general), Rod Rosenstein, then announced the appointment of former FBI director [Robert Mueller](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Mueller) as special [counsel](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/counsel) to oversee the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the election and possible collusion between Russian officials and the Trump campaign, which Rosenstein’s appointment order characterized as “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.” Mueller was also authorized to investigate and prosecute any federal crimes arising directly from or committed in the course of the investigation, including obstruction of justice, perjury, destruction of evidence, and witness intimidation.
Comey’s testimony in June before the Senate Intelligence Committee—which, like the House Intelligence Committee, was conducting its own investigation—was broadcast live on [television](https://www.britannica.com/technology/television-technology), [radio](https://www.britannica.com/topic/radio), and the [Internet](https://www.britannica.com/technology/Internet). Many Americans watched from bars and restaurants, which opened early in some parts of the [country](https://www.britannica.com/topic/nation-state) to provide [venues](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/venues) for viewing the much-anticipated event. Comey accused Trump and other administration officials of lying about Comey’s effectiveness as director of the FBI, and he attributed his being fired to Trump’s [alleged](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/alleged) desire to shut down the Russia investigation. Comey also revealed that, after being fired, he indirectly leaked the memo that recounted his dinner conversation with Trump in the hope of triggering the appointment of a special counsel to continue the Russia investigation.
Early in July 2017 the press reported that in June 2016 senior members of the Trump campaign, including its chair, [Paul Manafort](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Paul-Manafort), as well as Jared Kushner and Trump’s son [Donald, Jr.](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Donald-Trump-Jr), had met secretly in [Trump Tower](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Trump-Tower) with a lawyer associated with the Russian government. In response, Donald, Jr., issued a statement in which he claimed that the meeting had primarily concerned adoptions of Russian children by Americans and that he had not known in advance who on the Russian side would be [attending](https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/attending). Three days later the press reported the existence of emails predating the meeting in which the British publicist Rob Goldstone (who had helped Trump stage the 2013 Miss Universe contest in [Moscow](https://www.britannica.com/place/Moscow)) notified Donald, Jr., that the Russian government possessed incriminating “documents and information” on Clinton and offered to set up a meeting to convey them through a “Russian government attorney.” Attendance at such a meeting was potentially a crime under U.S. [campaign finance law](https://www.britannica.com/topic/United-States-campaign-finance-law), which generally prohibits accepting or soliciting foreign assistance in connection with a U.S. election.
[ More From Britannica United States: The Donald Trump administration](https://www.britannica.com/place/United-States/The-Donald-Trump-administration#ref1243011)
In January 2018 President Trump’s legal team acknowledged in a memo to the Mueller investigation that Trump himself had [dictated](https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/dictated) the false account of the meeting (claiming that it had concerned adoptions), thus contradicting earlier statements by his attorneys and by [White House press secretaries](https://www.britannica.com/topic/White-House-press-secretary). In August 2018 Trump admitted via Twitter that the purpose of the meeting was “to get information on an opponent” but insisted that the encounter was perfectly legal, that no information was forthcoming, and that he did not know about the meeting in advance. For the first time, he also publicly (on Twitter) called upon Attorney General [Jeff Sessions](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jeff-Sessions) to put an end to the Russia investigation by firing Mueller—a power, however, that Sessions did not possess, having [recused](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/recused) himself in March 2017 after revelations of his previously undisclosed contacts with the Russian ambassador as a member of the Trump campaign in September 2016.
In October 2017 the Mueller investigation announced a [plea agreement](https://www.britannica.com/topic/plea-bargaining) with Papadopoulos in which he admitted to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian nationals regarding the theft of emails from the Clinton campaign and pledged to cooperate with the investigation in exchange for its promise not to prosecute him on more serious charges. Later that month the Mueller team also unveiled a 12-count [indictment](https://www.britannica.com/topic/indictment) against Manafort and his associate Rick Gates (who himself had been an adviser to the Trump campaign), charging them with [money laundering](https://www.britannica.com/topic/money-laundering), tax evasion, and bank fraud in connection with Manafort’s consulting and lobbying efforts on behalf of Ukrainian political parties and leaders between 2006 and 2015. As part of a plea agreement with prosecutors, Flynn twice pleaded guilty in federal district court to lying to the FBI—once in December 2017 and again in December 2018. (Flynn’s sentencing was postponed by the district court on several occasions, initially to permit Flynn to cooperate with government investigators, which he did until mid-2019.) In February 2018 additional charges were filed against Manafort and Gates in a superseding indictment, leading Gates to reach a plea agreement; Gates’s testimony at Manafort’s trial in July–August was instrumental in securing the latter’s [conviction](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/conviction) on eight criminal counts. Facing a separate trial on other felony charges in September, Manafort reached his own plea agreement with the Mueller investigation that month.
Also in February 2018 the Mueller investigation indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian organizations on charges of conspiring to defraud the United States by interfering in its political and electoral processes, including the 2016 election. The indictment charged that the individual defendants, working in part through facilities provided by the Internet Research Agency (IRA) in St. Petersburg, used hundreds of fictitious and stolen [social media](https://www.britannica.com/topic/social-media) identities to spread “derogatory information” about Clinton and to support Trump. According to the [indictment](https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/indictment), they also engaged in efforts to discourage minorities from voting, promoted allegations of voter fraud by the [Democratic Party](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Democratic-Party), purchased political advertisements on social media, and used false U.S. identities to organize on-the-ground political rallies in several states.
Acting on a referral by the Mueller investigation, in April the FBI raided the home and office of [Michael Cohen](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Michael-Cohen), Trump’s personal attorney, seizing business records and recordings of telephone conversations between Cohen and his clients, including Trump. According to press reports, Cohen was being investigated on charges of tax evasion, bank fraud, and violations of campaign finance law in connection with his role in making or arranging hush-money payments in 2016 to Stormy Daniels and the model Karen McDougal in fulfillment of nondisclosure agreements concerning their alleged affairs with Trump in 2006–07. In March both women filed lawsuits seeking to have their agreements declared [invalid](https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/invalid). Cohen eventually pleaded guilty to eight criminal counts in August 2018 in a hearing at which he stated under oath that Trump had directed him to make or arrange payments to Daniels and McDougal. (Following the end of his first presidential term in 2021, Trump himself was indicted on state criminal charges of falsifying business records to conceal the Trump Organization’s reimbursement of Cohen for the hush-money payment to Daniels.)
In July 2018 Mueller indicted 12 Russian [military intelligence](https://www.britannica.com/topic/military-intelligence-military-science) officers for conspiring to interfere in the 2016 election by stealing thousands of emails and other documents from computer servers of the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign and publicly releasing them through fictitious social media identities and WikiLeaks. The indictment also charged the officers with breaking into the [computer network](https://www.britannica.com/technology/computer-network) of at least one state board of elections and stealing data on approximately 500,000 voters. (In a secret May 2017 report, later leaked to the press, the [National Security Agency](https://www.britannica.com/topic/National-Security-Agency) \[NSA\] determined that a total of 39 state boards of election had been targeted.) The announcement of the indictment prompted Trump to again express doubt that Russia was responsible for the interference, as he had done on several occasions since the beginning of the Russia investigation, and to again assert that the FBI was corrupt and dishonest for not pursuing a [criminal investigation](https://www.britannica.com/topic/criminal-investigation) of Clinton.
In September 2018 Papadopoulos was sentenced to serve 14 days in a minimum-security federal prison for lying to the FBI, becoming the first Trump campaign official to be jailed in connection with the Russia investigation. Two months later, in November, Mueller informed a trial judge that Manafort had violated his plea agreement by again lying in interviews with investigators and by making false statements before a [grand jury](https://www.britannica.com/topic/grand-jury). Manafort was eventually sentenced to a [combined](https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/combined) 7.5 years in prison by two federal courts in March 2019. Later that month he was charged with an additional 16 state felonies by the district attorney for [Manhattan](https://www.britannica.com/place/Manhattan-New-York-City). Meanwhile, in November 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to separate charges of lying to Congress for having told the House and Senate intelligence committees that Trump’s efforts to build a [hotel](https://www.britannica.com/topic/hotel) in Moscow had ended in January 2016, when, in fact, they had continued until at least June of that year, by which time Trump had become the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison in December 2018.
Also in November 2018, Trump fired Sessions and appointed as acting attorney general Matthew Whitaker, Sessions’s former chief of staff, who had been an outspoken critic of the Russia investigation before joining the Justice Department. Controversy over whether Whitaker should [recuse](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/recuse) himself from the investigation was soon overshadowed, however, by Trump’s nomination in December of [William Barr](https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Barr) as Sessions’s permanent successor. Barr, who had served (1991–93) as attorney general in the [George H.W. Bush](https://www.britannica.com/biography/George-H-W-Bush) administration, was known for his extreme view of executive power—one that entailed, among other things, that presidents cannot commit obstruction of justice through the exercise of the discretionary powers granted to them by the Constitution. Notably, Barr relied upon that theory to question the legitimacy of the Mueller investigation in an unsolicited memo that he submitted to the Justice Department in June 2018. The memo, which came to light soon after Barr’s nomination, immediately drew [criticism](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/criticism) from Democrats, who viewed it as an attempt to curry favor with the Trump administration and as a signal of Barr’s apparent willingness to shut down the Mueller inquiry if Trump so ordered. At his confirmation hearings Barr pledged that he would not interfere in the Russia investigation but refused to say whether he would release Mueller’s final report to the public. He was confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate in February 2019 in a mostly party-line vote.
Approximately five weeks after his confirmation, Barr informed [Congress](https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/Congress) that Mueller had submitted a final report on the results of his investigation and that there would be no additional indictments. (By that time, Mueller’s team had indicted 34 individuals and three businesses on nearly 200 criminal charges and obtained seven guilty pleas.) Two days later Barr sent to Congress an unusual written summary of the report’s contents, in which he stated that Mueller had not found sufficient evidence to establish a charge of [conspiracy](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/conspiracy) regarding the Trump campaign’s interactions with Russia and that Mueller had not made a traditional recommendation about whether Trump should be prosecuted for obstruction of justice. Absent that recommendation, he continued, he and Rosenstein had themselves determined that the evidence presented in Mueller’s report was “not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.” Barr’s public release of the summary at about the same time, and its wide coverage in the press, encouraged many Americans to assume that Mueller’s report had found no serious wrongdoing by the [president](https://www.britannica.com/topic/president-government-official), though others remained skeptical. According to press reports in late April, Mueller had privately written to Barr soon after the summary became public to complain that Barr’s characterization of the report to Congress “did not fully capture the [context](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/context), nature, and substance of this Office’s work and conclusions” and had created “public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation.”
On April 18, nearly one month after his letter to Congress, Barr released a [redacted](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/redacted) version of the Mueller report. House Democrats welcomed the release but insisted that Barr make available to them all [confidential](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/confidential) grand jury materials and the redacted passages related to them. After Barr refused, the House Judiciary Committee sued the Justice Department and obtained a [court order](https://www.britannica.com/topic/injunction) in October requiring the release of the grand jury materials. That order was later upheld by a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the [District of Columbia](https://www.britannica.com/place/Washington-DC) Circuit, a decision that the Justice Department appealed to the Supreme Court in July. In late November, after Biden’s victory over Trump in the 2020 presidential election, the Court removed the case from its argument calendar at the request of the Judiciary Committee.
The two volumes of Mueller’s report reflected the dual [mandates](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mandates) of his appointment as special counsel: the first detailed the goals and methods of the Russian attack on the [2016 presidential election](https://www.britannica.com/topic/United-States-presidential-election-of-2016), and the second outlined several potentially obstructive actions taken by Trump in connection with the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference (begun in July 2016) and the subsequent investigation led by Mueller (begun in May 2017).
Mueller’s office concluded in the first volume that there was insufficient evidence to establish that “members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government” despite “numerous links” between the two as detailed in the report. In the second volume, Mueller explained that his office had decided not to recommend charges of obstruction of justice against Trump because Justice Department regulations prohibited the indictment or criminal prosecution of a sitting president and because the office deemed it unfair to accuse Trump of a crime outside the context of a formal trial, where he would have the opportunity to answer the charges against him. Nevertheless, Mueller emphasized in the conclusion of the second volume that
> if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.
Although the Mueller report appeared to document numerous instances of impeachable behavior by Trump, Democrats in the House were initially divided over whether a formal impeachment [inquiry](https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/inquiry) should be opened. Despite demands for immediate action from several liberal Democrats, the House leadership and most other Democratic members preferred a more cautious approach, arguing that most Americans were opposed to impeachment and that Trump could not be removed from office anyway, because he was certain to be acquitted in the Republican-controlled Senate. The latter view, which House Speaker [Nancy Pelosi](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nancy-Pelosi) had advocated even before the release of the Mueller report, remained the prevailing position within the Democratic Party until the late summer of 2019 (*see below* [Ukraine scandal](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Donald-Trump/Foreign-relations#ref344665)).
In December 2019 the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General released a report on its investigation of the FBI’s actions during the early stages of the Russia investigation (then code-named “Crossfire Hurricane”). The report addressed, among other topics, whether the FBI had observed proper procedures in opening Crossfire Hurricane and four individual investigations of members of the Trump campaign (Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Manafort, and Flynn) and whether the FBI had placed any undercover agents within the Trump campaign to gain information about possible links and coordination with the Russian government. Although the report concluded that the investigation had been legitimately opened and that there was no evidence of political [bias](https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/bias) or of FBI “spying” on the Trump campaign, it also faulted the FBI and the Justice Department for serious errors and omissions and at least one case of apparent criminal wrongdoing in its handling of applications (to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court \[FISC\]) for warrants to surveil Page, then a Trump campaign adviser.
In an extraordinary decision in May 2020, the Justice Department moved to drop its case against Flynn on the grounds that his statements to the FBI were not “materially” relevant to the bureau’s investigation and that, in any event, the investigation of Flynn itself lacked any [legitimate](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/legitimate) counterintelligence or criminal purpose. Although the district court’s refusal to drop the case was eventually upheld by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the case became moot after Trump pardoned Flynn in late November 2020. In the last weeks of his presidency, Trump also granted pardons to Manafort and to Roger Stone, a friend and adviser who had been convicted of lying to Congress, obstruction, and witness tampering in connection with the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
## Other investigations
As Mueller’s investigation proceeded, and through the release of his report in March, several House committees—including the Judiciary Committee, the Select Committee on Intelligence, the Ways and Means Committee, the Foreign Affairs Committee, the Committee on Oversight and Reform, and the Financial Services Committee—were conducting their own [inquiries](https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/inquiries) into possible tax and financial crimes by Trump, the Trump Organization, the Trump inaugural committee, and the charitable Trump Foundation (dissolved in 2018), evidence of which had arisen from Mueller’s investigation and from congressional testimony by Cohen and other Trump associates. At the same time, the office of the U.S. District Attorney for the Southern District of [New York](https://www.britannica.com/place/New-York-state) (SDNY) continued its separate inquiry into possible tax fraud and violations of campaign-finance law by Trump in connection with the alleged hush-money payments to Daniels and McDougal (that investigation, however, was abruptly closed without explanation in July 2019). Other federal prosecutors, as well as state and local authorities, were looking into possible lawbreaking by Trump in connection with questionable donations to Trump’s [inaugural](https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/inaugural) committee, an alleged offer of a presidential pardon to Cohen, misuse of charitable assets by the Trump Foundation, accusations that Trump inflated the value of his assets in four major Trump Organization projects, apparently illegal tax schemes by the Trump family (*see above* [Early life and business career](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Donald-Trump#ref332843)), and other matters. By the summer of 2019 approximately 30 criminal or civil investigations of Trump and his family or associates were underway.
Since the early months of that year, however, the Trump administration had regularly refused to provide documents or witness testimony requested or subpoenaed by Democratic-led House committees investigating alleged corruption, abuse of power, and obstruction of justice by Trump or the Trump administration. In the wake of the public release in April of the redacted Mueller report, Trump publicly affirmed his administration’s refusal to cooperate with the House investigations, declaring that “we’re fighting all the subpoenas.” He and congressional Republicans frequently insisted that all such inquiries were [illegitimate](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/illegitimate) politically motivated attempts to embarrass Trump or to overturn the results of the 2016 election. Although past administrations, including the [Richard Nixon](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Richard-Nixon) administration, had also regularly defied congressional oversight, particularly with claims of [executive privilege](https://www.britannica.com/topic/executive-privilege), none had so broadly rejected, on explicitly partisan grounds, any congressional oversight whatsoever. Some [constitutional](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/constitutional) scholars warned that Trump’s refusal to recognize any legitimate purpose to Congress’s investigations of his administration threatened to undermine the constitutionally established [separation of powers](https://www.britannica.com/topic/separation-of-powers) between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. Soon after Pelosi announced the beginning of a formal impeachment investigation of Trump in September 2019 (*see below* [Ukraine scandal](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Donald-Trump/Foreign-relations#ref344665)), the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, announced in a letter to her and other House leaders that the Trump administration would refuse to cooperate with the inquiry in any way, primarily because it allegedly did not afford Trump the [due process](https://www.britannica.com/topic/due-process) guarantees provided to defendants in criminal trials. The House investigation, however, was not a trial.
After [Michael Cohen](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Michael-Cohen)’s [testimony](https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/testimony) to Congress in February 2019 that Trump had regularly inflated or deflated the value of his assets in order to obtain bank loans or to reduce his real estate taxes, respectively, the House Oversight Committee in March requested 10 years of Trump’s financial records from Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars, which responded that it could not legally provide the desired records. The committee’s subsequent subpoena was challenged by Trump in a lawsuit against Mazars and the Oversight Committee but ultimately upheld by a U.S. district court and the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Responding to an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court by Trump’s attorneys, Chief Justice [John Roberts, Jr.](https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-G-Roberts-Jr), indefinitely stayed the subpoena while the Court considered whether to review the judge’s decision. Meanwhile, two other House committees, on Financial Services and Intelligence, issued subpoenas to Deutsche Bank, Trump’s primary lender since the late 1990s, seeking nearly 10 years of tax returns and other financial documents; the Financial Services Committee also subpoenaed the U.S. bank Capital One for similar information. Trump’s lawsuit to prevent the two banks from releasing his financial information was rejected by a district court and, on appeal, by the Court of Appeals for the Second [Circuit](https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/Circuit). In a third case, Trump sued New York state officials (and preemptively the House Ways and Means Committee) to block enforcement of a grand jury subpoena to Mazars for eight years of his state tax returns, arguing that a sitting president is immune from state criminal subpoenas. After a district court dismissed that doctrine as “repugnant to the nation’s governmental structure and constitutional values” and the Second Circuit affirmed, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed in December 2019 to hear all three cases, consolidating the first two as *Trump* v. *Mazars*. The Court ultimately declined to invalidate the subpoenas in *Mazars* but remanded the cases to the lower courts for further consideration of their [implications](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/implications) for the separation of powers between Congress and the president. In *Trump* v. *Vance* the Court rejected Trump’s assertion of [immunity](https://www.britannica.com/topic/immunity-law) but again remanded the case to permit him to challenge the subpoena on other grounds.
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# Health care
An early goal of the Trump administration, as reflected in Trump’s first [executive order](https://www.britannica.com/topic/executive-order), was the repeal of [Obamacare](https://www.britannica.com/money/Patient-Protection-and-Affordable-Care-Act) (the [Affordable Care Act](https://www.britannica.com/money/Patient-Protection-and-Affordable-Care-Act), or ACA), which Trump had long derided—even before announcing his presidential bid—as an expensive failure. Trump pledged during his campaign that he would replace the ACA with a bill that would provide better coverage at lower premiums, and he promised that no one would lose [health insurance](https://www.britannica.com/money/health-insurance) under his plan. However, the details of the bill, called in the [House of Representatives](https://www.britannica.com/topic/House-of-Representatives-United-States-government) the American Health Care Act (AHCA), proved [contentious](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/contentious) even within his own party. Because Trump had not worked out a specific plan of his own, he was forced to rely on Republicans in the House to draft a [substantive](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/substantive) bill that would reduce government involvement in the health insurance market without depriving millions of Americans of the coverage they had acquired under the ACA. The Republicans did not have a detailed [alternative](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/alternative) in hand, however, resulting in a delay in Trump’s promised repeal of the law.
In early March 2017 House Republicans introduced their plan, which featured elimination of the ACA’s “[individual mandate](https://www.britannica.com/topic/individual-mandate)” (the requirement that most Americans obtain health insurance or pay a penalty), a reduction in individual tax credits for the purchase of insurance, cuts in federal [Medicaid](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Medicare-United-States-health-insurance/Medicaid#ref294325) funding, and nearly \$1 trillion in tax cuts over a 10-year period, including \$274 billion in cuts for persons earning at least \$200,000 a year. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) initially estimated that the plan would reduce the federal deficit by \$337 billion over 10 years as compared with current law but would also increase the number of uninsured people by 24 million over the same period. The bill immediately faced objections from both moderate and [conservative](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/conservative) Republicans. The former worried that too many people would lose affordable coverage, while the latter complained that the plan left too many burdensome provisions of the ACA in place. The anxieties of moderates in particular were amplified by the angry feedback they received at town hall meetings throughout the [country](https://www.britannica.com/topic/nation-state) from [constituents](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/constituents) who feared the loss of their health insurance. Unable to bridge the differences between the two factions, in late March the House leadership withdrew the bill without a vote—a major defeat for Trump, who had made repeal and replacement of the ACA a centerpiece of his campaign.
Six weeks later the House narrowly passed a revised version of the AHCA over the unanimous opposition of Democrats. A subsequent CBO analysis projected that the new version would reduce the deficit by \$119 billion over 10 years as compared with current law and increase the number of uninsured people by 23 million.
Soon after the AHCA was passed, Republicans in the Senate, working largely in secret and without input from Democrats, began crafting their own replacement for the ACA, initially called the Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA). Like the AHCA, the BCRA, in numerous versions under various names, would have decreased the deficit but significantly increased the number of uninsured, and it would have increased insurance premiums in the first year after its passage, according to analyses released by the CBO in late June. The BCRA thus faced the same [criticisms](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/criticisms) that had beset the House measure, revealing deep divisions between Senate Republicans who wished to limit the loss of health insurance in their states and those who aimed to dismantle as much of the current law as possible. Eventually, within a single week in late July, the Senate voted on three bills: a repeal of major provisions of the ACA without immediate replacement; a relatively [comprehensive](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/comprehensive) repeal and replacement of the ACA; and a more modest “skinny” repeal and replacement. Despite considerable political pressure on Senate Republicans from the Trump administration, all three measures failed.
Having been unsuccessful in their attempts to repeal and replace the ACA, Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration pursued a series of measures intended to cumulatively undermine the law by making the health insurance it provided less accessible, less affordable, and less effective (through reductions in coverage and other measures), a strategy that Trump described as allowing Obamacare to “explode.” Those changes, some of which predated the failure of Republican [alternatives](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/alternatives) to the ACA in the Senate, included cutting funding for [advertising](https://www.britannica.com/money/advertising) and for assistance with enrollment in Obamacare; drastically reducing open enrollment periods; ending cost-sharing subsidies that enabled insurance companies to reduce out-of-pocket expenses for low- and middle-income Americans; and repealing (effective in 2019) the ACA’s “individual [mandate](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mandate),” which had required all Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty. (The last measure was part of Republican tax legislation drafted in secret and passed without Democratic support in December 2017; Trump signed the measure later that month. A subsequent analysis by the CBO determined that the legislation, which among other things reduced the corporate tax rate from 35 to 21 percent, would increase the federal deficit by approximately \$1.8 trillion over a 10-year period.) In November 2017 a study by the CBO had estimated that repealing the individual mandate and making no other changes to the ACA would increase the number of uninsured people by 13 million after 10 years and raise premiums by 10 percent in most years through 2027. Other changes included allowing states to impose work requirements on people receiving Medicaid; allowing the creation of “association health plans” that would offer fewer essential health benefits than plans under the ACA and charge higher premiums to certain enrollees based on factors such as gender, occupation, and age; and permitting the sale of short-term plans that would provide minimal benefits and would not cover medical services for preexisting conditions.
## Environmental policy
[](https://www.britannica.com/video/Donald-Trump-president/-217985)
Donald J. Trump's inauguration as the 45th U.S. presidentDonald Trump being sworn in as the 45th president of the United States.
(more)
[See all videos for this article](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Donald-Trump/images-videos)
One of the areas in which the Trump administration was able to move quickly to [implement](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/implement) its policies was the [environment](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/environment), in part because many of the changes it sought could be accomplished through executive action by Trump or his appointees. Other changes were undertaken through legislation adopted by Congress, whose Republican majority generally shared Trump’s environmental views. In January, for example, Trump signed memoranda to hasten approval and completion of the [Dakota Access](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Dakota-Access-Pipeline) and [Keystone XL](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Keystone-pipeline) oil pipelines, both of which had been blocked by the Obama administration on environmental grounds. In February Trump signed legislation to block an [Interior Department](https://www.britannica.com/topic/US-Department-of-the-Interior) rule that would have restricted the dumping of toxic mining waste into streams and other waterways. In March Trump signed an executive order that [rescinded](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rescinded) various Obama-era policies and programs related to [climate change](https://www.britannica.com/science/climate-change), including a 2016 freeze on new coal leases on federal lands. In the same month, [EPA](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Environmental-Protection-Agency) administrator Pruitt withdrew an EPA request that oil and [natural gas](https://www.britannica.com/science/natural-gas) companies report [methane](https://www.britannica.com/science/methane) emissions from their facilities and rejected a total ban on the [pesticide](https://www.britannica.com/technology/pesticide) chlorpyrifos, against the advice of the EPA’s own scientists. Other significant decisions included drastically reducing the size of [national monuments](https://www.britannica.com/topic/national-monument-American-protected-area) created by Presidents Obama and Clinton; [rescinding](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rescinding) the Obama administration’s [Clean Power Plan](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Clean-Power-Plan), a set of EPA regulations that had [mandated](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mandated) a 32 percent reduction in carbon emissions by the U.S. power sector between 2005 and 2030; revoking fuel-efficiency standards for [cars](https://www.britannica.com/technology/automobile) and light trucks developed by the EPA during the Obama administration; and proposing numerous changes to the [Endangered Species Act](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Endangered-Species-Act) (ESA) that would weaken legal protections for [endangered](https://www.britannica.com/science/endangered-species) and threatened animals and make listing species as threatened more difficult.
Undoubtedly the most momentous environmental decision of the first Trump administration was his announcement in June that the [United States](https://www.britannica.com/place/United-States) would withdraw from the [Paris Agreement](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Paris-Agreement-2015) on climate change, under which the United States and 194 other countries had agreed to a broad range of measures intended to limit potentially catastrophic increases in global average temperatures during the 21st century and to [mitigate](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mitigate) the economic consequences of [global warming](https://www.britannica.com/science/global-warming). Trump contended that the agreement would harm the American economy (through government-mandated reductions in the country’s [greenhouse gas](https://www.britannica.com/science/greenhouse-gas) emissions) and was in other respects unfair and even demeaning to the United States—historically the largest emitter of greenhouse gases and in the early 21st century the second largest emitter after [China](https://www.britannica.com/place/China). Trump’s decision was [condemned](https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/condemned) by government and political leaders, scientists, business executives, and activists throughout the world but praised by Republicans in Congress, who viewed it as a reassertion of American independence in world affairs and a repudiation of the environmental policies of the Obama administration. Like Trump, many Republican lawmakers doubted that climate change was real, while others acknowledged its reality but questioned the human origins of global warming.
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External Websites
- [Miller Center - Donald Trump](https://millercenter.org/president/trump)
- [Donald J. Trump Presidential Library - Biography of President Donald J. Trump](https://www.trumplibrary.gov/trumps/president-donald-j-trump)
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Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students.
- [Donald Trump - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11)](https://kids.britannica.com/kids/article/Donald-Trump/628383)
- [Donald Trump - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)](https://kids.britannica.com/students/article/Donald-Trump/313895) |
| Readable Markdown | [Donald Trump](https://cdn.britannica.com/49/193149-050-6E032CB8/Donald-Trump-rally-Pennsylvania-Hershey-election-2016.jpg)Donald Trump speaking at a rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania, a month after winning the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
In February 2017 Trump’s new national security adviser, [Michael Flynn](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Michael-Flynn), was forced to resign after press reports disclosed that Flynn had continued to serve in the [White House](https://www.britannica.com/topic/White-House-Washington-DC) despite a warning from the [Justice](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Justice) Department that he was [vulnerable](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vulnerable) to Russian [blackmail](https://www.britannica.com/topic/extortion) for having lied to Vice Pres. [Mike Pence](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mike-Pence) about the substance of a telephone conversation between Flynn and the Russian ambassador to the [United States](https://www.britannica.com/place/United-States) in December 2016. Flynn’s contacts with the ambassador, both before and after the election, had been monitored by the FBI as part of its routine surveillance of the ambassador’s communications and in connection with a then secret investigation since July 2016 of possible collusion between Russian officials and prominent members of the Trump campaign. That investigation had been triggered by information obtained by Australian authorities, who reported to the [FBI](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Federal-Bureau-of-Investigation) in May that [George Papadopoulos](https://www.britannica.com/biography/George-Papadopoulos), a foreign-policy adviser in the Trump campaign, had told an Australian diplomat in London that Russia had “dirt” on [Clinton](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hillary-Clinton), an apparent reference to the stolen emails that were eventually released by [WikiLeaks](https://www.britannica.com/topic/WikiLeaks) in July.
## News •
[Speculation](https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/Speculation) in the press regarding the existence of the investigation had been repeatedly dismissed by Trump as “fake news” but was confirmed by [Comey](https://www.britannica.com/biography/James-Comey) in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee in March 2017, during which he also contradicted Trump’s claim that [Obama](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Barack-Obama) had spied on the Trump campaign by tapping Trump’s telephones. Democratic members of Congress, meanwhile, expressed dismay that Comey had chosen to report the discovery of additional Clinton emails in October 2016 but had waited until after the election to reveal the Russia investigation.
After Comey testified again in May about Russian interference in the election, Trump abruptly fired him, ostensibly on the recommendation of the Justice Department, which in memos solicited by Trump criticized Comey for his public disclosures regarding Clinton’s emails. Trump soon acknowledged that he had intended to fire Comey regardless of the Justice Department’s recommendation and that “this Russia thing” was a factor in his decision. Later that month the press obtained a copy of a memo written by Comey that summarized a conversation between Comey and Trump at a dinner at the White House in January. The memo stated that Trump had asked Comey to pledge “loyalty” to him and that Trump had indirectly requested that Comey drop the FBI’s investigation of Flynn. The memo immediately raised concerns, even among some Republicans, that Trump’s actions might have [constituted](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/constituted) obstruction of justice. The deputy [attorney general](https://www.britannica.com/topic/attorney-general), Rod Rosenstein, then announced the appointment of former FBI director [Robert Mueller](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Mueller) as special [counsel](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/counsel) to oversee the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the election and possible collusion between Russian officials and the Trump campaign, which Rosenstein’s appointment order characterized as “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.” Mueller was also authorized to investigate and prosecute any federal crimes arising directly from or committed in the course of the investigation, including obstruction of justice, perjury, destruction of evidence, and witness intimidation.
Comey’s testimony in June before the Senate Intelligence Committee—which, like the House Intelligence Committee, was conducting its own investigation—was broadcast live on [television](https://www.britannica.com/technology/television-technology), [radio](https://www.britannica.com/topic/radio), and the [Internet](https://www.britannica.com/technology/Internet). Many Americans watched from bars and restaurants, which opened early in some parts of the [country](https://www.britannica.com/topic/nation-state) to provide [venues](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/venues) for viewing the much-anticipated event. Comey accused Trump and other administration officials of lying about Comey’s effectiveness as director of the FBI, and he attributed his being fired to Trump’s [alleged](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/alleged) desire to shut down the Russia investigation. Comey also revealed that, after being fired, he indirectly leaked the memo that recounted his dinner conversation with Trump in the hope of triggering the appointment of a special counsel to continue the Russia investigation.
Early in July 2017 the press reported that in June 2016 senior members of the Trump campaign, including its chair, [Paul Manafort](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Paul-Manafort), as well as Jared Kushner and Trump’s son [Donald, Jr.](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Donald-Trump-Jr), had met secretly in [Trump Tower](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Trump-Tower) with a lawyer associated with the Russian government. In response, Donald, Jr., issued a statement in which he claimed that the meeting had primarily concerned adoptions of Russian children by Americans and that he had not known in advance who on the Russian side would be [attending](https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/attending). Three days later the press reported the existence of emails predating the meeting in which the British publicist Rob Goldstone (who had helped Trump stage the 2013 Miss Universe contest in [Moscow](https://www.britannica.com/place/Moscow)) notified Donald, Jr., that the Russian government possessed incriminating “documents and information” on Clinton and offered to set up a meeting to convey them through a “Russian government attorney.” Attendance at such a meeting was potentially a crime under U.S. [campaign finance law](https://www.britannica.com/topic/United-States-campaign-finance-law), which generally prohibits accepting or soliciting foreign assistance in connection with a U.S. election.
[ More From Britannica United States: The Donald Trump administration](https://www.britannica.com/place/United-States/The-Donald-Trump-administration#ref1243011)
In January 2018 President Trump’s legal team acknowledged in a memo to the Mueller investigation that Trump himself had [dictated](https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/dictated) the false account of the meeting (claiming that it had concerned adoptions), thus contradicting earlier statements by his attorneys and by [White House press secretaries](https://www.britannica.com/topic/White-House-press-secretary). In August 2018 Trump admitted via Twitter that the purpose of the meeting was “to get information on an opponent” but insisted that the encounter was perfectly legal, that no information was forthcoming, and that he did not know about the meeting in advance. For the first time, he also publicly (on Twitter) called upon Attorney General [Jeff Sessions](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jeff-Sessions) to put an end to the Russia investigation by firing Mueller—a power, however, that Sessions did not possess, having [recused](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/recused) himself in March 2017 after revelations of his previously undisclosed contacts with the Russian ambassador as a member of the Trump campaign in September 2016.
In October 2017 the Mueller investigation announced a [plea agreement](https://www.britannica.com/topic/plea-bargaining) with Papadopoulos in which he admitted to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian nationals regarding the theft of emails from the Clinton campaign and pledged to cooperate with the investigation in exchange for its promise not to prosecute him on more serious charges. Later that month the Mueller team also unveiled a 12-count [indictment](https://www.britannica.com/topic/indictment) against Manafort and his associate Rick Gates (who himself had been an adviser to the Trump campaign), charging them with [money laundering](https://www.britannica.com/topic/money-laundering), tax evasion, and bank fraud in connection with Manafort’s consulting and lobbying efforts on behalf of Ukrainian political parties and leaders between 2006 and 2015. As part of a plea agreement with prosecutors, Flynn twice pleaded guilty in federal district court to lying to the FBI—once in December 2017 and again in December 2018. (Flynn’s sentencing was postponed by the district court on several occasions, initially to permit Flynn to cooperate with government investigators, which he did until mid-2019.) In February 2018 additional charges were filed against Manafort and Gates in a superseding indictment, leading Gates to reach a plea agreement; Gates’s testimony at Manafort’s trial in July–August was instrumental in securing the latter’s [conviction](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/conviction) on eight criminal counts. Facing a separate trial on other felony charges in September, Manafort reached his own plea agreement with the Mueller investigation that month.
Also in February 2018 the Mueller investigation indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian organizations on charges of conspiring to defraud the United States by interfering in its political and electoral processes, including the 2016 election. The indictment charged that the individual defendants, working in part through facilities provided by the Internet Research Agency (IRA) in St. Petersburg, used hundreds of fictitious and stolen [social media](https://www.britannica.com/topic/social-media) identities to spread “derogatory information” about Clinton and to support Trump. According to the [indictment](https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/indictment), they also engaged in efforts to discourage minorities from voting, promoted allegations of voter fraud by the [Democratic Party](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Democratic-Party), purchased political advertisements on social media, and used false U.S. identities to organize on-the-ground political rallies in several states.
Acting on a referral by the Mueller investigation, in April the FBI raided the home and office of [Michael Cohen](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Michael-Cohen), Trump’s personal attorney, seizing business records and recordings of telephone conversations between Cohen and his clients, including Trump. According to press reports, Cohen was being investigated on charges of tax evasion, bank fraud, and violations of campaign finance law in connection with his role in making or arranging hush-money payments in 2016 to Stormy Daniels and the model Karen McDougal in fulfillment of nondisclosure agreements concerning their alleged affairs with Trump in 2006–07. In March both women filed lawsuits seeking to have their agreements declared [invalid](https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/invalid). Cohen eventually pleaded guilty to eight criminal counts in August 2018 in a hearing at which he stated under oath that Trump had directed him to make or arrange payments to Daniels and McDougal. (Following the end of his first presidential term in 2021, Trump himself was indicted on state criminal charges of falsifying business records to conceal the Trump Organization’s reimbursement of Cohen for the hush-money payment to Daniels.)
In July 2018 Mueller indicted 12 Russian [military intelligence](https://www.britannica.com/topic/military-intelligence-military-science) officers for conspiring to interfere in the 2016 election by stealing thousands of emails and other documents from computer servers of the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign and publicly releasing them through fictitious social media identities and WikiLeaks. The indictment also charged the officers with breaking into the [computer network](https://www.britannica.com/technology/computer-network) of at least one state board of elections and stealing data on approximately 500,000 voters. (In a secret May 2017 report, later leaked to the press, the [National Security Agency](https://www.britannica.com/topic/National-Security-Agency) \[NSA\] determined that a total of 39 state boards of election had been targeted.) The announcement of the indictment prompted Trump to again express doubt that Russia was responsible for the interference, as he had done on several occasions since the beginning of the Russia investigation, and to again assert that the FBI was corrupt and dishonest for not pursuing a [criminal investigation](https://www.britannica.com/topic/criminal-investigation) of Clinton.
In September 2018 Papadopoulos was sentenced to serve 14 days in a minimum-security federal prison for lying to the FBI, becoming the first Trump campaign official to be jailed in connection with the Russia investigation. Two months later, in November, Mueller informed a trial judge that Manafort had violated his plea agreement by again lying in interviews with investigators and by making false statements before a [grand jury](https://www.britannica.com/topic/grand-jury). Manafort was eventually sentenced to a [combined](https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/combined) 7.5 years in prison by two federal courts in March 2019. Later that month he was charged with an additional 16 state felonies by the district attorney for [Manhattan](https://www.britannica.com/place/Manhattan-New-York-City). Meanwhile, in November 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to separate charges of lying to Congress for having told the House and Senate intelligence committees that Trump’s efforts to build a [hotel](https://www.britannica.com/topic/hotel) in Moscow had ended in January 2016, when, in fact, they had continued until at least June of that year, by which time Trump had become the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison in December 2018.
Also in November 2018, Trump fired Sessions and appointed as acting attorney general Matthew Whitaker, Sessions’s former chief of staff, who had been an outspoken critic of the Russia investigation before joining the Justice Department. Controversy over whether Whitaker should [recuse](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/recuse) himself from the investigation was soon overshadowed, however, by Trump’s nomination in December of [William Barr](https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Barr) as Sessions’s permanent successor. Barr, who had served (1991–93) as attorney general in the [George H.W. Bush](https://www.britannica.com/biography/George-H-W-Bush) administration, was known for his extreme view of executive power—one that entailed, among other things, that presidents cannot commit obstruction of justice through the exercise of the discretionary powers granted to them by the Constitution. Notably, Barr relied upon that theory to question the legitimacy of the Mueller investigation in an unsolicited memo that he submitted to the Justice Department in June 2018. The memo, which came to light soon after Barr’s nomination, immediately drew [criticism](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/criticism) from Democrats, who viewed it as an attempt to curry favor with the Trump administration and as a signal of Barr’s apparent willingness to shut down the Mueller inquiry if Trump so ordered. At his confirmation hearings Barr pledged that he would not interfere in the Russia investigation but refused to say whether he would release Mueller’s final report to the public. He was confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate in February 2019 in a mostly party-line vote.
Approximately five weeks after his confirmation, Barr informed [Congress](https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/Congress) that Mueller had submitted a final report on the results of his investigation and that there would be no additional indictments. (By that time, Mueller’s team had indicted 34 individuals and three businesses on nearly 200 criminal charges and obtained seven guilty pleas.) Two days later Barr sent to Congress an unusual written summary of the report’s contents, in which he stated that Mueller had not found sufficient evidence to establish a charge of [conspiracy](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/conspiracy) regarding the Trump campaign’s interactions with Russia and that Mueller had not made a traditional recommendation about whether Trump should be prosecuted for obstruction of justice. Absent that recommendation, he continued, he and Rosenstein had themselves determined that the evidence presented in Mueller’s report was “not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.” Barr’s public release of the summary at about the same time, and its wide coverage in the press, encouraged many Americans to assume that Mueller’s report had found no serious wrongdoing by the [president](https://www.britannica.com/topic/president-government-official), though others remained skeptical. According to press reports in late April, Mueller had privately written to Barr soon after the summary became public to complain that Barr’s characterization of the report to Congress “did not fully capture the [context](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/context), nature, and substance of this Office’s work and conclusions” and had created “public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation.”
On April 18, nearly one month after his letter to Congress, Barr released a [redacted](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/redacted) version of the Mueller report. House Democrats welcomed the release but insisted that Barr make available to them all [confidential](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/confidential) grand jury materials and the redacted passages related to them. After Barr refused, the House Judiciary Committee sued the Justice Department and obtained a [court order](https://www.britannica.com/topic/injunction) in October requiring the release of the grand jury materials. That order was later upheld by a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the [District of Columbia](https://www.britannica.com/place/Washington-DC) Circuit, a decision that the Justice Department appealed to the Supreme Court in July. In late November, after Biden’s victory over Trump in the 2020 presidential election, the Court removed the case from its argument calendar at the request of the Judiciary Committee.
The two volumes of Mueller’s report reflected the dual [mandates](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mandates) of his appointment as special counsel: the first detailed the goals and methods of the Russian attack on the [2016 presidential election](https://www.britannica.com/topic/United-States-presidential-election-of-2016), and the second outlined several potentially obstructive actions taken by Trump in connection with the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference (begun in July 2016) and the subsequent investigation led by Mueller (begun in May 2017).
Mueller’s office concluded in the first volume that there was insufficient evidence to establish that “members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government” despite “numerous links” between the two as detailed in the report. In the second volume, Mueller explained that his office had decided not to recommend charges of obstruction of justice against Trump because Justice Department regulations prohibited the indictment or criminal prosecution of a sitting president and because the office deemed it unfair to accuse Trump of a crime outside the context of a formal trial, where he would have the opportunity to answer the charges against him. Nevertheless, Mueller emphasized in the conclusion of the second volume that
> if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.
Although the Mueller report appeared to document numerous instances of impeachable behavior by Trump, Democrats in the House were initially divided over whether a formal impeachment [inquiry](https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/inquiry) should be opened. Despite demands for immediate action from several liberal Democrats, the House leadership and most other Democratic members preferred a more cautious approach, arguing that most Americans were opposed to impeachment and that Trump could not be removed from office anyway, because he was certain to be acquitted in the Republican-controlled Senate. The latter view, which House Speaker [Nancy Pelosi](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nancy-Pelosi) had advocated even before the release of the Mueller report, remained the prevailing position within the Democratic Party until the late summer of 2019 (*see below* [Ukraine scandal](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Donald-Trump/Foreign-relations#ref344665)).
In December 2019 the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General released a report on its investigation of the FBI’s actions during the early stages of the Russia investigation (then code-named “Crossfire Hurricane”). The report addressed, among other topics, whether the FBI had observed proper procedures in opening Crossfire Hurricane and four individual investigations of members of the Trump campaign (Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Manafort, and Flynn) and whether the FBI had placed any undercover agents within the Trump campaign to gain information about possible links and coordination with the Russian government. Although the report concluded that the investigation had been legitimately opened and that there was no evidence of political [bias](https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/bias) or of FBI “spying” on the Trump campaign, it also faulted the FBI and the Justice Department for serious errors and omissions and at least one case of apparent criminal wrongdoing in its handling of applications (to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court \[FISC\]) for warrants to surveil Page, then a Trump campaign adviser.
In an extraordinary decision in May 2020, the Justice Department moved to drop its case against Flynn on the grounds that his statements to the FBI were not “materially” relevant to the bureau’s investigation and that, in any event, the investigation of Flynn itself lacked any [legitimate](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/legitimate) counterintelligence or criminal purpose. Although the district court’s refusal to drop the case was eventually upheld by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the case became moot after Trump pardoned Flynn in late November 2020. In the last weeks of his presidency, Trump also granted pardons to Manafort and to Roger Stone, a friend and adviser who had been convicted of lying to Congress, obstruction, and witness tampering in connection with the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
## Other investigations
As Mueller’s investigation proceeded, and through the release of his report in March, several House committees—including the Judiciary Committee, the Select Committee on Intelligence, the Ways and Means Committee, the Foreign Affairs Committee, the Committee on Oversight and Reform, and the Financial Services Committee—were conducting their own [inquiries](https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/inquiries) into possible tax and financial crimes by Trump, the Trump Organization, the Trump inaugural committee, and the charitable Trump Foundation (dissolved in 2018), evidence of which had arisen from Mueller’s investigation and from congressional testimony by Cohen and other Trump associates. At the same time, the office of the U.S. District Attorney for the Southern District of [New York](https://www.britannica.com/place/New-York-state) (SDNY) continued its separate inquiry into possible tax fraud and violations of campaign-finance law by Trump in connection with the alleged hush-money payments to Daniels and McDougal (that investigation, however, was abruptly closed without explanation in July 2019). Other federal prosecutors, as well as state and local authorities, were looking into possible lawbreaking by Trump in connection with questionable donations to Trump’s [inaugural](https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/inaugural) committee, an alleged offer of a presidential pardon to Cohen, misuse of charitable assets by the Trump Foundation, accusations that Trump inflated the value of his assets in four major Trump Organization projects, apparently illegal tax schemes by the Trump family (*see above* [Early life and business career](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Donald-Trump#ref332843)), and other matters. By the summer of 2019 approximately 30 criminal or civil investigations of Trump and his family or associates were underway.
Since the early months of that year, however, the Trump administration had regularly refused to provide documents or witness testimony requested or subpoenaed by Democratic-led House committees investigating alleged corruption, abuse of power, and obstruction of justice by Trump or the Trump administration. In the wake of the public release in April of the redacted Mueller report, Trump publicly affirmed his administration’s refusal to cooperate with the House investigations, declaring that “we’re fighting all the subpoenas.” He and congressional Republicans frequently insisted that all such inquiries were [illegitimate](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/illegitimate) politically motivated attempts to embarrass Trump or to overturn the results of the 2016 election. Although past administrations, including the [Richard Nixon](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Richard-Nixon) administration, had also regularly defied congressional oversight, particularly with claims of [executive privilege](https://www.britannica.com/topic/executive-privilege), none had so broadly rejected, on explicitly partisan grounds, any congressional oversight whatsoever. Some [constitutional](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/constitutional) scholars warned that Trump’s refusal to recognize any legitimate purpose to Congress’s investigations of his administration threatened to undermine the constitutionally established [separation of powers](https://www.britannica.com/topic/separation-of-powers) between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. Soon after Pelosi announced the beginning of a formal impeachment investigation of Trump in September 2019 (*see below* [Ukraine scandal](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Donald-Trump/Foreign-relations#ref344665)), the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, announced in a letter to her and other House leaders that the Trump administration would refuse to cooperate with the inquiry in any way, primarily because it allegedly did not afford Trump the [due process](https://www.britannica.com/topic/due-process) guarantees provided to defendants in criminal trials. The House investigation, however, was not a trial.
After [Michael Cohen](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Michael-Cohen)’s [testimony](https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/testimony) to Congress in February 2019 that Trump had regularly inflated or deflated the value of his assets in order to obtain bank loans or to reduce his real estate taxes, respectively, the House Oversight Committee in March requested 10 years of Trump’s financial records from Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars, which responded that it could not legally provide the desired records. The committee’s subsequent subpoena was challenged by Trump in a lawsuit against Mazars and the Oversight Committee but ultimately upheld by a U.S. district court and the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Responding to an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court by Trump’s attorneys, Chief Justice [John Roberts, Jr.](https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-G-Roberts-Jr), indefinitely stayed the subpoena while the Court considered whether to review the judge’s decision. Meanwhile, two other House committees, on Financial Services and Intelligence, issued subpoenas to Deutsche Bank, Trump’s primary lender since the late 1990s, seeking nearly 10 years of tax returns and other financial documents; the Financial Services Committee also subpoenaed the U.S. bank Capital One for similar information. Trump’s lawsuit to prevent the two banks from releasing his financial information was rejected by a district court and, on appeal, by the Court of Appeals for the Second [Circuit](https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/Circuit). In a third case, Trump sued New York state officials (and preemptively the House Ways and Means Committee) to block enforcement of a grand jury subpoena to Mazars for eight years of his state tax returns, arguing that a sitting president is immune from state criminal subpoenas. After a district court dismissed that doctrine as “repugnant to the nation’s governmental structure and constitutional values” and the Second Circuit affirmed, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed in December 2019 to hear all three cases, consolidating the first two as *Trump* v. *Mazars*. The Court ultimately declined to invalidate the subpoenas in *Mazars* but remanded the cases to the lower courts for further consideration of their [implications](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/implications) for the separation of powers between Congress and the president. In *Trump* v. *Vance* the Court rejected Trump’s assertion of [immunity](https://www.britannica.com/topic/immunity-law) but again remanded the case to permit him to challenge the subpoena on other grounds. |
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