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Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation Hardcover – September 29, 2020

by Andrew Weissmann (Author)

4.7 1,609 ratings

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In the first and only inside account of the Mueller investigation, one of the special counsel’s most trusted prosecutors breaks his silence on the team’s history-making search for the truth, their painstaking deliberations and costly mistakes, and Trump’s unprecedented efforts to stifle their report.

“Weissmann delivers the kind of forceful, ringing indictment that Mueller’s report did not.”—The New York Times

In May 2017, Robert Mueller was tapped to lead an inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, coordination by foreign agents with Donald Trump’s campaign, and obstruction of justice by the president. Mueller assembled a “dream team” of top prosecutors, and for the next twenty-two months, the investigation was a black box and the subject of endless anticipation and speculation—until April 2019, when the special counsel’s report was released.

In Where Law Ends, legendary prosecutor Andrew Weissmann—a key player in the Special Counsel’s Office—finally pulls back the curtain to reveal exactly what went on inside the investigation, including the heated debates, painful deliberations, and mistakes of the team—not to mention the external efforts by the president and Attorney General William Barr to manipulate the investigation to their political ends. 

Weissmann puts the reader in the room as Mueller’s team made their most consequential decisions, such as whether to subpoena the president, whether to conduct a full financial investigation of Trump, and whether to explicitly recommend obstruction charges against him. Weissmann also details for the first time the debilitating effects that President Trump himself had on the investigation, through his dangling of pardons and his constant threats to shut down the inquiry and fire Mueller, which left the team racing against the clock and essentially fighting with one hand tied behind their backs.  

In Where Law Ends, Weissmann conjures the camaraderie and esprit de corps of the investigative units led by the enigmatic Mueller, a distinguished public servant who is revealed here, in a way we have never seen him before, as a manager, a colleague, and a very human presence. Weissmann is as candid about the team’s mistakes as he is about its successes, and is committed to accurately documenting the historic investigation for future generations to assess and learn from. Ultimately, Where Law Ends is a story about a team of public servants, dedicated to the rule of law, tasked with investigating a president who did everything he could to stand in their way.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Weissmann delivers the kind of forceful, ringing indictment that Mueller's report did not."--The New York Times"Unlike the other Trump books that get hyped as 'explosive,' this one lays out its case so patiently that its conclusions arrive not with a bang but with a snap--the click of an indictment falling into place. . . . Weissmann's book is a fascinating document--a candid mea culpa, a riveting true-crime story, that's nonetheless presented in the measured prose of someone who remains a stalwart institutionalist."--Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times

"Where Law Ends burns like an old-fashioned 150-watt bulb, delivering light and heat in equal measure. . . . Where Law Ends is a gift--a clarifying piece of history, wrapped up in our era's boundless anger and suspicion."--Devlin Barrett, The Washington Post "A damning indictment of a 'lawless' president."--George Packer, The Atlantic"A lucid and engrossing insider's look at Special Counsel Robert Mueller's inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 election . . . an essential record of what the Mueller investigation proved and why it failed to bring Trump down."--Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Andrew Weissmann teaches criminal and national security law at New York University School of Law and is a partner at the law firm of Jenner & Block. Previously, he served as a lead prosecutor in Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel's Office and as chief of the Fraud Section in the Department of Justice. Weissmann served as the general counsel for the FBI under Director Mueller. He also directed the Enron Task Force, where he supervised prosecutions in connection with the company’s collapse. As a federal prosecutor for fifteen years in the Eastern District of New York, Weissmann prosecuted members of the Colombo, Gambino, and Genovese crime families, and police officers for misconduct arising from the Abner Louima attack. He holds degrees from Columbia Law School and Princeton University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

It was Sunday afternoon, March 24, 2019. I was passing through the Lincoln Tunnel in my old gray Subaru, heading toward the soulless thruways that stretch between New York City and Washington, D.C. On the passenger side floor was Innis, my English cocker spaniel, curled up and dozing. His breeder had promised me he was a great travel dog who would easily be lulled to sleep in a moving vehicle, a quality that had come in handy, given my peripatetic lifestyle over the years, ping-ponging between my home in New York and my job at the Department of Justice. The trips had grown increasingly rare, though, as I found myself working around the clock in Washington.

As numbing as this drive usually was, this particular trip was wistful. I had spent the past twenty-two months working as a prosecutor for Robert S. Mueller III, leading one of the three main teams in the Special Counsel’s Office charged with investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and coordination between the Russians and the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump. Two days before, on Friday, March 22, we had finally delivered our report, all 448 pages of it, to the new attorney general, William Barr. We were feeling a note of finality to our collective mission. The Special Counsel’s Office had already largely dissolved. We’d said our goodbyes. I was driving back to Washington, one last time, to polish a couple of last “memos to file” and organize the documents in my office for the government archivists who would preserve our papers for posterity. At age sixty-one, after more than twenty years as a federal prosecutor, I would be returning to teach at NYU School of Law as a private citizen in my hometown.

After months of speculation, the press now had written confirmation from Barr himself that our report had been submitted and that he would soon be issuing a public statement about it. All weekend, the drumbeat in the media grew louder, as the press and many other Americans who felt invested in our work awaited the attorney general’s announcement. Internally, of course, we already knew what the report contained and had not breathed a word of it, true to our no-leak reputation.

The special counsel’s report was a devastating recitation of how Russian government operatives had infiltrated our electoral process, a conclusion that we all believed to be our most important long-term finding and one that required immediate and decisive action by our political leaders. As to whether any member of the Trump campaign, or anyone else, conspired with the Russians, our report was mixed. We had found insufficient evidence to criminally charge a conspiracy with the Russians beyond a reasonable doubt—the high standard of proof required for any criminal charge and conviction. But the frequency and seriousness of interactions we uncovered between the campaign and the Russians were nevertheless chilling, with Trump campaign officials both receptive to, and soliciting, Russian assistance throughout the summer and fall of 2016.

The final question our investigation pursued was whether the president had obstructed justice before or after our office was up and running. The facts here were no less appalling, although we had not indicted the president or, frustratingly, even taken the final leap of putting a label on what the facts added up to. Instead, our report set out numerous episodes that provided clear evidence against the president. However, we were forbidden from indicting him for these crimes, as we were employees of the Department of Justice and bound to follow an internal Department policy that no president could be indicted while in office—whether we agreed with that rule or not.

Given this idiosyncratic circumstance, Mueller had decided it would be unfair to say that we found the president had committed a crime, as Trump would not be able to challenge our conclusion in court, at least until he left office. Thus our report laid out the proof of his criminal conduct in detail, but did not give our legal assessment of it—we never said outright that he’d committed a crime. Instead, we had left it to Congress to make its own assessment of our evidence, or to another prosecutor in the future, who would be free to indict the president once he’d left office.

We were well aware that this approach would read awkwardly and, frankly, as a transparent attempt to hide our true thoughts. Anyone reading the report as a whole would see that when the evidence did not rise to such a level, we had explicitly said so, including when the conduct was that of the president. By contrast, our silence on whether Trump had obstructed justice—whether the president of the United States had broken the law—would be deafening. When he was not guilty of certain crimes, we said so; and when he was, we were silent. But we had found no other way of dealing with Mueller’s decision to abide by the principle of protecting anyone who could not have his or her day in court.

I spent most of the five-hour drive to Washington awaiting news of Barr’s announcement on the radio. I was listening on my iPhone, as the radio in my car had been on the fritz ever since a mechanic had jump-started my battery improperly around the time I’d joined the Special Counsel’s Office, and I’d never found a moment to get it fixed. For hours, there was only endless blather and speculation on air, filling the time. But, late that afternoon, as I drove along the New Jersey Turnpike, that changed: There was real news to report.

My ears perked up. The CNN announcers reported that they had their hands on a four-page letter from the attorney general, summarizing the conclusions of our report. This immediately struck me as odd. We knew that only diehards would read the entire report, which was written by lawyers and filled with dense legalese, so we had prepared summaries of our findings, highlighting key conclusions and evidence in both volumes of the report. When Barr announced he would be issuing something public shortly after receiving our report, I had assumed it would be these summaries. That would be the easiest way to get information to the public quickly, as Barr professed he wanted to do, and would not carry any risk of skewing one way or the other what the special counsel had determined. After all, the whole point of appointing a special counsel was to ensure an investigation of the president would be conducted independently, rather than led by the attorney general, a presidentially appointed cabinet member who might, therefore, be beholden to the subject of the probe. But from what I was now hearing, Barr had clearly not taken this approach, as our summaries were much longer than four pages.

The voices on the radio then began breathlessly announcing key takeaways from Barr’s letter: Mueller had concluded that the Russians had meddled in the 2016 presidential election. Mueller had concluded that there was no evidence of collusion. Mueller had not found that the president obstructed justice, but neither did he find that the president had not obstructed justice. Instead, they explained, the letter claimed that the special counsel had left the obstruction determination to the attorney general—and that Barr, along with his deputy Rod Rosenstein, had concluded that there’d been no obstruction by the president. That was that: Trump was cleared.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House; First Edition (September 29, 2020)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 432 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593138570
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593138571
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.55 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.46 x 1.41 x 9.54 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #101,556 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #17 in Federal Jurisdiction Law (Books)
- #181 in United States Executive Government
- #2,271 in United States History (Books)

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From The New York Times:

A Mueller Prosecutor Presents A Riveting Case

Andrew Weissmann, a top lawyer in the special counsel’s office, details the investigators’ findings and frustrations in his new memoir, “Where Law Ends.”

“Weissmann delivers the kind of forceful, ringing indictment that Mueller’s report did not.”

“'Mobsters used the threat of ‘whacking’ potential cooperators to keep everyone in line,' Weissmann writes. 'The president had the power to pardon to reward those who stayed loyal.' It’s a startling analogy that Weissmann delivers in his characteristically muted, matter-of-fact style. Unlike the other Trump books that get hyped as “explosive,” this one lays out its case so patiently that its conclusions arrive not with a bang but with a snap — the click of an indictment falling into place."

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/books/review-where-law-ends-andrew-weissmann.html?smid=em-share

NPR Fresh Air:

A Lead Prosecutor On Mueller's Team Weighs In On Where The Investigation Fell Short

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/29/918129496/a-lead-prosecutor-on-muellers-team-weighs-in-on-where-the-investigation-fell-sho

Publisher's Weekly:

"Attorney Weissmann delivers a lucid and engrossing insider's look at Special Counsel Robert Mueller's inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 election."

Time:

“The book reads like a love letter to future historians.”

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Customers find the book provides an informative and factual account of the Mueller investigation. They find the writing style clear and easy to read, providing straightforward clarity and depth to the report. Many describe it as a great, essential read that is well worth their time. The story is interesting and intriguing, with a cautionary tale feel. Readers praise the author's literary skills and consider him a brilliant writer. Overall, they describe the book as fascinating and illuminating.

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36 customers mention "Information quality"36 positive0 negative

Customers find the book provides an insightful and honest account of the Mueller investigation. It provides documented knowledge and a factual recounting of the events. The narrative is informative, including the author's reactions to uncovering facts and stress as they work. Readers can dissect the subtle intricacies of legal jurisprudence from the insights shared. The book is passionate about truth and includes important recommendations that need to be enacted to strengthen and protect the Constitution.

"...As for the middle of this book, it is a necessary and important factual recounting of the Mueller investigation...." Read more

"...Weissmann puts a human face on the research, their reactions to uncovering facts, their stress as they work under the threat of being fired by the..." Read more

"...style makes for easy reading as he’s both conversational and informative; the pages get turned quickly...." Read more

"...The book is an important contribution to the history of this time period and the political and judicial machinations, but it takes effort to read." Read more

27 customers mention "Writing style"23 positive4 negative

Customers find the writing style clear and easy to understand. It provides insight into the process leading up to the Mueller report, describing the roadblocks and challenges faced by the special counsel's office.

"You've got to read this book. The writing is impressively clear, and the story is interesting...." Read more

"...WRITING & EDITING: Although the writing is impeccable, in terms of specific allegations and findings by the Mueller team, and the opinions expressed..." Read more

"...His writing style makes for easy reading as he’s both conversational and informative; the pages get turned quickly...." Read more

"...I learned so many things that were fascinating scary and mind boggling . Highly highly recommended . Hard to put it down!" Read more

25 customers mention "Readability"25 positive0 negative

Customers find the book informative and engaging. They say it's an essential read and well worth the time. Readers appreciate the thorough look at the Mueller report and its creation.

"...thought they knew about the Mueller report, this is the ultimate look at the work that went into its creation...." Read more

"From this brilliant monograph, the reader can dissect the subtle intricacies of legal jurisprudence from the insights shared by one of the greatest..." Read more

"Excellent read from someone who actually knows what went on behind the scenes of Mueller report. Barr should be ashamed...." Read more

"This is, unquestionably, the best book on the Trump years. Superbly written, at times reading like a suspense novel, it is filled with..." Read more

16 customers mention "Story quality"16 positive0 negative

Customers find the story interesting and engaging. They say it's a cautionary tale that provides valuable insights and lessons learned. The book is described as suspenseful at times, with shocking behind-the-scenes criminal actions. Readers appreciate the clear explanation of crimes and how the whitewash of the report by Barr led to them.

"...The writing is impressively clear, and the story is interesting...." Read more

"...including interactions with team members are presented in a clear storyline with context where it helps inform the situation...." Read more

"...I learned so many things that were fascinating scary and mind boggling . Highly highly recommended . Hard to put it down!" Read more

"...contribution to the history of this time period and the political and judicial machinations, but it takes effort to read." Read more

10 customers mention "Writer quality"10 positive0 negative

Customers praise the author's writing style. They find his literary skills strong enough to paint a clear picture for each story. Readers describe the book as spellbinding, illuminating, and riveting. It provides a clear-eyed recitation of decisions made, evidence gathered, and shocking behind-the-scenes details. The book is described as an important voice and a must-read.

"...I found that Andrew’s literary skills were strong enough to paint a solid picture for each of the twenty-two months of Mueller’s work...." Read more

"...limitations and imperfections of the Mueller Report in clear and candid prose...." Read more

"...The author tells it well though I could have done without the long Manafort details. A brave description of how Mueller let us down." Read more

"...It is a clear-eyed recitation of the decisions made, evidence gathered, and shocking behind-the-scenes criminal actions by those closest to..." Read more

5 customers mention "Look"5 positive0 negative

Customers find the book engaging and a fascinating look at the Mueller report.

"A fascinating look on the inside of the investigation. I couldn’t put the book down and ended up reading it in a day." Read more

"Spectacular book, spellbinding, illuminating, riveting, cannot put it down. #wherelawends" Read more

"...Great look behind the curtain of Mueller and his opaque investigation." Read more

"Superb inside look inside Meuller investigation. Weissmann is a brilliant writer." Read more

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Bookwyrm
As a lifelong Republican, I thank the author for his service, his book, and his suggested reforms
Reviewed in the United States on September 29, 2020
Verified Purchase

I know some commenters will say I’m lying, I can’t possibly be a Republican because I maintain that President Trump doesn’t exemplify my idea of a Republican President. I can still believe in my party while disagreeing with their current and frankly mind-boggling nominee. But Trump is president until we vote in someone else.

That's the blessing of a democracy. If we don't like the guy who's in office, we just wait a few years and try again. But even Trump – or any President – should be kept in check and limited to their assigned roles more readily by adopting reforms to ensure the rule of law is honored. And Andrew Weissmann, in this book, Where the Law Ends, has some logical and feasible suggestions.

I think we need suggestions and ideas such as Weissmann’s, because our Presidents have started to stray and use their power in such a way that shows how close we are to stepping over the line and having our democracy destroyed. I’ve often wondered what it would take to break America down, and now I fear it could be a President’s irresponsible abuse of power, a pandemic, and foreign interference. However, I have hope, because this is America, and we’ve made it through hard times before and emerged stronger and more united.

While Where the Law Ends is a weighty tome of a book, its most remarkable material is in the introduction and the epilogue. There Weissmann briefly summarizes the depth and breadth of the offenses and suggests reforms that would keep Presidents from overstepping their authority, disrespecting the rule of law, and abusing those who are performing their jobs by threatening them, firing them arbitrarily, or pardoning those who are being investigated. We shouldn’t have a President who has no loyalty, no respect, and no love for our country, our constitution, or our laws, flouting them with impunity, no matter their party.

As for the middle of this book, it is a necessary and important factual recounting of the Mueller investigation. Necessary because we must record history and remember it accurately to learn from it and prevent it from recurring. I’d dock this book half a star because I found it so dry, and yet I must give it a star for completeness and a lack of hysterical drama. And Weissmann really demonstrates why the Mueller investigation was reported the way that it was, in its actual report and in Barr’s inaccurate summation. Because they tried so hard to keep the letter of the law, they were capsized by those who had no regard for the law at all, but only politics and power.

Overall, this is an incredibly important account, but if you’re like me (I admit to ADD), use your favorite methods to keep your concentration so if you lag during the middle uber-factual recounting, you can keep focused and not lose yourself in the details. I have a feeling that Where the Law Ends is going to end up being required reading at universities.

A few quotes:
“As one small witness to history, I now know that the death of our democracy is possible. Fixing it is possible, too.”

“When I read our report now, I see a document caught in the tension between our stated and de facto missions. In part, the report reads as a highly legalistic internal Justice Department document, akin to the scrupulously detailed prosecution memoranda prepared by prosecutors before bringing an indictment. At the same time, it is addressed to the American people—a public accounting of the facts we uncovered. Ultimately, the report does not serve either purpose adequately.”

“First, a report that was truly addressed to the public would have been structured and written in a more straightforward manner, without the legal nomenclature of an internal prosecution memo. It would have drawn conclusions more clearly and explicitly, rather than risk overwhelming those conclusions with long, narrow disquisitions about the interpretation and application of the law. Such a report would have been more transparent about what we did not investigate, such as the president’s finances, and why, and would better emphasize which questions we were not able, or permitted, to sufficiently answer, such as the Department’s obstacles in seeking to interview and subpoena the president. And it would have proposed remedial steps to deal with problems like Russian interference, just as the 9/11 Commission Report addressed the threat of future terrorist attacks.”

“We must first recognize that the power to pardon is conferred on the presidency—it is not a personal power of the man or woman who inhabits the office. As president, that person has a sworn duty to uphold the law fully and faithfully, not to undermine or invalidate it. And so, where a pardon is being used to protect the president personally, or to protect the president’s family, friends, or conspirators, it should not be seen as a valid exercise of that constitutional power.”

“The special counsel’s report was a devastating recitation of how Russian government operatives had infiltrated our electoral process, a conclusion that we all believed to be our most important long-term finding and one that required immediate and decisive action by our political leaders. As to whether any member of the Trump campaign, or anyone else, conspired with the Russians, our report was mixed. We had found insufficient evidence to criminally charge a conspiracy with the Russians beyond a reasonable doubt—the high standard of proof required for any criminal charge and conviction. But the frequency and seriousness of interactions we uncovered between the campaign and the Russians were nevertheless chilling, with Trump campaign officials both receptive to, and soliciting, Russian assistance throughout the summer and fall of 2016.”

“The facts here were no less appalling, although we had not indicted the president or, frustratingly, even taken the final leap of putting a label on what the facts added up to. Instead, our report set out numerous episodes that provided clear evidence against the president. However, we were forbidden from indicting him for these crimes, as we were employees of the Department of Justice and bound to follow an internal Department policy that no president could be indicted while in office—whether we agreed with that rule or not.”

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Am anon
Gently used great deal for me!
Reviewed in the United States on January 19, 2025
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Very happy with the price and condition

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gloria piper
An important record that everyone should read
Reviewed in the United States on October 14, 2020
Verified Purchase
You've got to read this book. The writing is impressively clear, and the story is interesting. Weissmann introduces us to Mueller and to himself, bringing in a background that eminently qualifies him to help lead in the investigation. As the counsel organizes into teams, top experts are recruited. And then they get to work, initially relying on the press for leads and then taking off on their own.

Weissmann puts a human face on the research, their reactions to uncovering facts, their stress as they work under the threat of being fired by the president. I was impressed by the work standard of the investigation, how they park bipartisanship outside the office and how they toiled every day, occasionally for 24 hours.

Facts point to an ongoing warfare with Russia that is as serious as the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It's invisible cyberwarfare that threatens our democracy to this day. The investigators catch many culprits, but the one they are forbidden to thoroughly investigate is Donald Trump. They are forbidden to look into his finances. They can not interview him. They can not indict him, even though they are constantly harassed by his efforts to discredit and fire Mueller, to get people to lie, and to dangle pardons to encourage witnesses to refuse to cooperate. The investigators are forced to pull their punches, to ignore certain leads, to end the investigation before it is completed. They accomplish a lot, but all they are in a position to say about the president is that Trump is not exonerated, thereby leaving it up to Congress to deal with the president as required.

After slogging away for 22 months, imagine Weissmann's shock to find Attorney General Barr serving the president with lies rather than serving the public with truth.

While some of these happenings are familiar to me, there was much to learn. "Where the law ends, tyranny begins." Weissmann shows us how that quote applies.

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Amazon Customer
Weissman is brilliant and brave
Reviewed in Canada on October 24, 2024
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Makes Bill Barr’s version look like a pathetic work of fiction

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bettyparry
"LICENSE TO KILL".
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 4, 2020
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The book reminded me of a line from the above song, “he wants it all and he wants it his way”. The book reads like a detective thriller and also reminded me of “All The President’s Men”. The author writes it chronologically and you get caught up with what’s going to happen next as he takes you through the events as they are happening. You feel as if you are in the room where it happened as the net closes around Trump. He responds by tweeting more and more hysterical attacks on anyone and everyone who doesn’t take his side. A.W. takes you through it all from the interviewing of the staff to carry out the Inquiry to the denouement.
It’s quite exciting as you read the discovery of an email which is dynamite for the investigation, or someone being interviewed and confesses to something equally incredible. The investigation was split into 3 groups: Team R, Team M, and Team 600 ie. Russia, Manefort, and Obstruction. AW runs Team M and gets to realize that he is just a mini-me of Trump. In other words, somebody who believes that rules and the law do not apply to him and that there is nothing he wouldn’t do to enrich himself. AW had been extremely successful in prosecuting Enron and bringing down Mafia bosses. He explains the main tool he used was getting dirt on lower employees in the organization to flip on the top dogs.
The more the team dug the more worried they became as they realized that the new President was totally lawless and there would be no limit that all the president’s men would go to for his interests. This is whether to protect him or increase his interests, usually financial. The information they got included private memos that Trump wrote which showed his frame of mind. They were full of bile, hostility, self-importance, self-gratification and total disregard for laws and norms unless they benefited him. The White House attorneys are supposed to work for the public, the WH as an institution, not the president personally. “We realized that the Oval Office was the Magic Kingdom- a reality-free zone, with just the ravings of our own Mad King George to deal with”.
The main tool of getting people to flip was blocked more often than not due to the ravings of Trump. “It would become increasingly clear that Trump was wielding the presidential power of pardon as an enticement to deter witnesses from co-operating with our office, while simultaneously wielding his power to fire Mueller as a threat to keep us reined in”. This ever-present threat weakened them so much that they were too afraid to do many things they would normally do, such as subpoena the president. AW constantly compares how similar the work is to investigating a mafia organization in how it functions. Similar threats and pressures are there but it is much worse in this situation. A mafia boss could not close down his own investigation as could Trump. This meant, with the rules that they had to operate under, and Trump’s special powers, the Inquiry only did part of what they could have and should have done.
In essence, AW states, the team got played by Attorney General Barr. They assumed that his personal friendship with Mueller would mean that Barr would play fair. The longer the investigation went on, they all realized that Barr was operating as Trump’s personal lawyer rather than on behalf of the people. In other words, he was getting money under false pretenses and was being totally immoral. The team that played by the rules lost, the team that played dirty won. The last chapter is spent analyzing Barr’s statements and explanations which prove that he is the second most dangerous man in America. AW also makes suggestions on how to ensure that the democracy is not ridden roughshod again by a lawless president only interested in himself.
I write this as Trump is in hospital with Covid, the hoax as he declared originally. He said, “it will be gone by Easter”. Over 208,000 deaths later, and rising, even his most fanatical cult members now realize that it’s not just another variation of the flu. Due to his complete mismanagement of the epidemic from the start up to now many have died that should not have. The way he has treated the Ukraine has meant a greater number of Ukrainian deaths as a result, according to experts, by the Russian invasion. When the 63 million people voted for him in 2016, they did not realize that they were giving him a license to kill.

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Dr. Gary S. Shea
Perhaps the more important report of the special counsel's investigation
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 29, 2023
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Reading about the Trump Presidency can take over your life and while much of the literature is good, you have to read a lot to get several perspectives on the actions of even individual actors. Add to that is the requirement, I think, that the author really has to be an active and prominent lawyer before you get much more than politically loaded rubbish.

So, if you are determined to have just a short shelf on the Trump years, you have to seriously consider adding this book to it. After the Special Counsel's Report itself (the Mueller Report, as it is sometimes called), this would book would have to be on the shelf beside it.

There are many threads to the Trump story that this contributes to, but the two most important ones are i) the Manafort prosecutions and ii) the debate about the obstruction of the Special Counsel's investigation by the White House, which can reasonably include Bill Barr's port-Report actions.

i) The author was the lead prosecutor in "Team M", so his description of the actual investigations fleshes out the what Manafort and his co-conspirators (Gates and Kilimnik mainly) were up to. Current readers will be struck by how instrumental Manafort was in the Russian preparations to invade and take over parts of Ukraine. Manafort's actions resonate today in bloodshed, but that of course is not what he was prosecuted for. He did it all for money and so it was only his criminal actions in getting and laundering and avoiding taxes on money are what he was prosecuted for...and for witness tampering even while he was being tried for the money matters.

ii) The concluding chapters are a really important addition to the debate about needed reforms in the Special Counsel regulations. After reading those I found it useful to go back again to Chapter 8 of Bauer and Goldsmith's Chapter 8 in After Trump. Look it up.

This is a Trump book that I will study and read again. It is a lot more than the narrative fluff that dominates the Trump literature.

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WillB
Fascinating Inside Look at the Mueller Inquiry
Reviewed in Canada on November 13, 2020
Verified Purchase
If you want a real life detective story about all the investigative steps taken or not in the independent counsel’s investigation this is the book for you. Although I had read a lot about the independent counsel’s inquiry, there is even more insider’s knowledge in this book. The author seemed to take some superficial shots at James Comey, but hey you either love him or hate him.

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pamela cramond-malkin
This is probably the best book on Trump and his terrible ways written
Reviewed in Canada on December 10, 2020
Verified Purchase
Weissman is the best and most credible of non journalists. His book is a “ how it should be-done”
he writes well. He is humbe,honest and clear. If the world needs an honest broker and a clear speaking advocate for reasonableness and incisive analysis-Andrew Weissman is a star.

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5.0 out of 5 stars As a lifelong Republican, I thank the author for his service, his book, and his suggested reforms

5.0 out of 5 stars Gently used great deal for me!

5.0 out of 5 stars An important record that everyone should read

Top reviews from other countries

5.0 out of 5 stars Weissman is brilliant and brave

5.0 out of 5 stars "LICENSE TO KILL".

5.0 out of 5 stars Perhaps the more important report of the special counsel's investigation

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating Inside Look at the Mueller Inquiry

5.0 out of 5 stars This is probably the best book on Trump and his terrible ways written

As a lifelong Republican, I thank the author for his service, his book, and his suggested reforms

Gently used great deal for me!

An important record that everyone should read

Weissman is brilliant and brave

"LICENSE TO KILL".

Perhaps the more important report of the special counsel's investigation

Fascinating Inside Look at the Mueller Inquiry

This is probably the best book on Trump and his terrible ways written