Robert Mueller’s Investigation:
A Timeline of the Key Events

The Internet Research Agency, financed by companies controlled by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian restaurateur known as “Putin’s chef,” allegedly set up a St. Petersburg office with hundreds of employees to interfere with U.S. elections, according to a sweeping indictment by the special counsel’s office.

Using fake personas and stolen identities of U.S. citizens, the agency’s workers posed as activists on social media and posted information and advertisements that promoted Trump and criticized his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, prosecutors said. That included a paid ad titled, “Ohio Wants Hillary 4 Prison.” The agency allegedly organized and coordinated pro-Trump rallies, too, using fake identities on Facebook and Twitter.

In February 2018, Mueller’s office secured an indictment against 13 Russians and three Russian entities for using the troll-farm operation to disrupt U.S. elections and political processes.

The Trump Organization began considering a hotel and condominium tower in Moscow in September 2015, and it signed a letter of intent the next month with a Moscow-based investment firm. Felix Sater, a Russian-born developer and U.S. citizen, brokered the deal. Sater had served time in prison for assault, worked as a government informant against the mob and helped Trump with a development in Manhattan. He said he lined up financing for the deal from VTB Bank, a Russian lender that was under American sanctions, the New York Times reported. The bank denied involvement.

Michael Cohen, then Trump’s personal attorney, told Congress in August 2017 that Trump’s project had been scrapped in January 2016. But on Nov. 29, 2018, he pleaded guilty to lying to Congress, admitting that negotiations on the project continued through June 2016—deep into the presidential campaign.

Trump denied any Russia business dealings were active as he was running for president. Yet the deal remained live even as Russians were seeking to make multiple inroads into the Trump campaign and had begun social media and hacking efforts to benefit Trump’s candidacy.

George Papadopoulos joined the Trump campaign in March 2016 as a foreign policy adviser. That same month, he met a U.K. professor who claimed to have “substantial connections” to Russian government officials.

The next month, the professor, Joseph Mifsud, told Papadopoulos that the Russian government had dirt on Clinton in the form of thousands of emails.

During a night of heavy drinking at a London bar in May 2016, Papadopoulos passed on the tip to an Australian diplomat, according to the New York Times. The FBI, tipped off by the Australians, began looking into the matter, starting the investigation into possible collaboration between Russia and the Trump campaign.

Papadopoulos and Sam Clovis, the Trump campaign’s national co-chairman, along with other campaign officials, discussed setting up a Russia trip for Trump, according to prosecutors. In 2017, Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to investigators about his contacts with Mifsud and others. He was sentenced to 14 days in jail.

In one of the most intriguing incidents of the Russia inquiry, Donald Trump Jr. attended a meeting with several Russians after he was promised “dirt” on Clinton. Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin attended the brief meeting, as did Trump campaign officials Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner. It included a discussion of a 2012 law that allowed the U.S. government to punish Russian officials for human rights violations, which Russia had been trying to overturn.

After news of the meeting surfaced a year later, Trump dictated a statement for his son to give to the New York Times, saying the meeting was primarily about a dispute over adoptions of Russian children, according to the newspaper. They both later acknowledged that the younger Trump hoped to obtain damaging information about Clinton.

In addition, Donald Jr. said the sanctions law would be re-examined if his father was elected, Veselnitskaya told Bloomberg News. She said he also asked for written evidence that ill-gotten proceeds had gone to the Clinton campaign. She said she didn’t have any.

At the Republican nominating convention in Cleveland in July 2016, Trump’s team succeeded in changing the GOP platform to avoid pledging U.S. weapons for Ukraine to fight Russian forces. The Trump staffers removed language about providing “lethal defensive weapons” and replaced it with “appropriate assistance.” That position contradicted the stance of most Republican foreign policy leaders.

As a candidate, Trump dismissed the idea of helping Ukrainians fight against the Russians. Manafort, his campaign chairman, had worked for the former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who was an ally of Russian President Vladamir Putin.

Investigators are trying to determine the reasons behind that shift in position.

At a news conference, Trump said he hoped Moscow would uncover Clinton’s emails, saying, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”

Russia was already on the case.

Starting in March 2016, hackers working for Russian intelligence began trying to gain access to the Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the U.S. contends. That June, they allegedly began releasing thousands of stolen emails and documents, using fictitious online personas like Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks. On the day of Trump’s plea to Russia, the hackers made their first “spearphishing” attempt—using a friendly-looking email to compromise a user’s defenses—at a domain used by Clinton’s personal office, the U.S. said.

Some stolen documents, including emails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, were transferred to WikiLeaks, which published them at strategic times during the campaign, according to prosecutors.

While managing Trump’s campaign, Manafort met at an upscale Manhattan cigar bar with Konstantin Kilimnik, a translator who worked with Manafort over a decade on campaigns for pro-Kremlin politicians and parties in Ukraine, according to prosecutors. (Kilimnik is tied to Russian intelligence, Mueller’s office has said.) Rick Gates, Manafort’s former right-hand man, was in attendance. The men left separately, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors have focused on whether Manafort shared polling data with Kilimnik about Trump’s campaign, as well as their discussion of a peace plan for Ukraine. Gates, who was indicted with Manafort and pleaded guilty, has cooperated extensively with Mueller.

Kilimnik was indicted on June 8, 2018, and charged with obstructing justice and conspiring to tamper with witnesses.

Erik Prince, who founded the private security firm Blackwater and supported the Trump campaign, met with Kirill Dmitriev, who headed a Russian-controlled wealth fund and had ties to Putin. The meeting was organized by George Nader, an adviser to the United Arab Emirates. Nader has been cooperating with Mueller’s investigation.

Mueller has been trying to determine if the Prince-Dmitriev meeting in the Seychelles, just before Trump’s inauguration, was an effort by the presidential transition team to set up a back channel to Russia. Prince told Congress that the meeting was a chance encounter.

The so-called Steele Dossier, a collection of allegations and salacious gossip about Trump and some of his associates, was published by BuzzFeed just before Trump took office.

Gathered by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, initially as opposition research for Republicans and later for Clinton’s campaign, the dossier suggested a highly coordinated effort by the Russians to help Trump win, sow discord in the U.S. and encourage divisions in the Western alliance.

Trump denounced the dossier’s findings as “fake news,” and his Republican allies have falsely claimed the document was the impetus for a politically motivated investigation. The most titillating claim—sexual acts involving Trump that were arranged or monitored by Russian intelligence—hasn’t been corroborated. But the primary theme of the report—that the Russians sought to influence the election to disrupt U.S. politics and Western alliances—has been substantiated.

Worried that Trump was trying to improperly influence an investigation, Comey wrote memos to himself after their meetings. Comey said that during a meeting in January 2017, Trump told him: “I need loyalty.” In a February meeting, Trump urged Comey to stop a federal inquiry into Flynn, who had resigned as national security adviser the day before, Comey said.

According to Comey, Trump said in an Oval Office meeting, “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

Trump fired Comey three months later, saying he lacked leadership and later citing “this Russia thing” in an interview with NBC News. Trump also disputed Comey’s accounts of their meetings, which were made public after he was fired as FBI director.

Some critics suggest Trump’s behavior with Comey could amount to obstruction of justice, allegations that Mueller’s office has been considering.

Since Comey’s firing, Trump has continuously trashed Mueller’s investigation, berated Justice Department officials for not protecting him, praised witnesses who refused to testify and hinted at pardons for loyalists.

A day after he fired Comey, Trump welcomed the Russian foreign minister and ambassador to the Oval Office for a meeting that was chummy and uninhibited. He described Comey as a “nut job,” and he shared highly classified intelligence about a terrorist threat involving laptop computers on airplanes, according to accounts in the New York Times and the Washington Post.

The meeting was emblematic of Trump’s relationship with Putin, one characterized by secret meetings and mutual affection. That has fueled concerns that the Russians have compromising information, known as “kompromat,” on Trump, a question that may ultimately be answered by Mueller’s team.

The following year, at a summit with Putin, Trump said he believed the Russian leader’s claims that Russia didn’t interfere in the U.S. presidential election, despite evidence from his own intelligence agencies to the contrary.