Justice Department curtailed probe into Donald Trump's Russia ties

The Justice Department secretly took steps in 2017 to narrow the investigation into Russian election interference and any links to the Trump campaign, according to former law enforcement officials, keeping investigators from completing an examination of

President Trump’s decades-long personal and business ties to Russia.

The special counsel who finished the investigation, Robert S Mueller III, secured three dozen indictments and convictions of some top Trump advisers, and he produced a report that outlined Russia’s wide-ranging operations to help get Trump elected and the president’s efforts to impede the inquiry.

But law enforcement officials never fully investigated Trump’s own relationship with Russia, even though some career FBI counterintelligence investigators thought his ties posed such a national security threat that they took the extraordinary step of opening an inquiry into them. Within days, the former deputy attorney general Rod J Rosenstein curtailed the investigation without telling the bureau, all but ensuring it would go nowhere. 

A bipartisan report by the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee released this month came the closest to an examination of the president’s links to Russia. Senators depicted extensive ties between Trump associates and Russia, identified a close associate of a former Trump campaign chairman as a Russian intelligence officer and outlined how allegations about Trump’s encounters with women during trips to Moscow could be used to compromise him. But the senators acknowledged they lacked access to the full picture, particularly any insight into Trump’s finances.

Now, as Trump seeks re-election, major questions about his approach to Russia remain unanswered. He has repeatedly shown an openness to Russia, an adversary that attacked American democracy in 2016, and he has refused to criticise or challenge the Kremlin’s increasing aggressions toward the West. 

©2020 The New York Times