Garrett M. Graff writes:

Andrew Weissmann headed the prosecution of Paul Manafort on Robert Mueller’s team. His new memoir, Where Law Ends, is an elegy for the Russia investigation that never was—one in which the special counsel’s office was actually able to crack the oddball collection of grifters who populated Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016, from Paul Manafort to George Papadopoulos, and figure out the actual truth of their relationship with an expansive cast of Russian oligarchs and intelligence operatives.

Weissmann’s book is the first to emerge from the famously tight-lipped special counsel’s office, and he paints an eloquent and ultimately dispiriting picture of a talented team of some of the nation’s best investigators stymied on three sides: by uncooperative witnesses, by Mueller’s “punctilious[ness] about due process and rectitude,” and most of all by a president who on multiple occasions criminally obstructed justice.

“The principal challenge to our investigation was not the public glare, or the Fox News diatribes, or the president’s ad hominem attacks. It was the threat posed by the unique powers of the president that were continually wielded against us: the power to fire us and to pardon wrongdoers who might otherwise cooperate with our investigation,” Weissmann writes. “Within weeks of commencing our work, our team’s very existence was in doubt, and though the threat of our firing ebbed and flowed throughout, it never entirely abated. This sword of Damocles affected our investigative decisions, leading us at certain times to act less forcefully and more defensively than we might have. It led us to delay or ultimately forgo entire lines of inquiry, particularly regarding the president’s financial ties to Russia.”

Part of what makes Weissmann’s book so striking in its disappointment about the fate and trajectory of the special counsel’s probe is that he’s a deep Mueller loyalist; a career prosecutor, he worked on Mueller’s staff when the latter was FBI director and later became the general counsel for the FBI during the final months of Mueller’s 12-year reign at the bureau. A famously brass-knuckled prosecutor who successfully led Mafia trials—and, later, the Justice Department’s ultimately unsatisfying prosecution of Enron energy executives—he came to the probe with no pollyannaish misconceptions about how witnesses obstruct justice and how prosecutions can falter in the face of politics and legal realities. Weissmann, in fact, was one of the first Mueller recruited to his investigative team in 2017. He helped build the rest of the team himself, personally recruiting some of its biggest names and FBI leaders. He clearly has deep respect for the man with whom he repeatedly served; his frustration with Mueller comes across less as a scorching tell-all and more the disappointment of a son who finds that the childhood image of his father doesn’t measure up in adulthood. [Continue reading…]